Earth Observation for Agro-Insurance

On 21 and 22 November 23 representatives of global First- and Re-Insurances, ESA and EARSC met at GeoVille in Innsbruck to discuss the challenges and fitting Earth observation solutions for the sector. This is already the second large scale user workshop in the frame of ESA’s Earth Observation Best Practice for Agro-Insurance (EO4I) project that started in spring 2019. The workshop was organised by GeoVille together with its partners VITO and CGI.

Participants from Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland used this workshop to discuss their challenges in daily business life to get a better understanding within the Agro-Insurance and Earth Observation Sector. The discussions focused on the consolidation of challenges and requirements of the main users (First Insurances for Agriculture) as well as presenting existing methods of Earth observation. To broaden the view, the user group was widened to Re-insurances and challenges that are on the surface not directly related to earth observation, were identified. A round table with all participants at the end focused on the insurance’s business processes to get deeper insights in the daily challenges and link them with possible Earth observation capabilities.

About the project:

The over-riding objective of the EO4I project is to produce a roadmap for the development of agro-insurance guidelines for the use of EO data by the agro-insurance sector. The output will form the basis for a potential phase 2 activity- i.e. the development of the guidelines themselves. In order to reach this end point, there are three key activities that will be undertaken:

•    Analysis of the geoinformation needs of the sector
•    Analysis of current EO capabilities relevant to needs, and the capability gap which exists
•    Formulation of a roadmap for developing EO guidelines for the sector

The project connects closely with the users of EO data in the agro-insurance sector, in specific here the working group ASV (Austrian Hail insurance, Swiss Hail Insurance and Vereinigte Hail Insurance). However, the overall development logic is very flexible and iterative, thus, is open for including new stakeholders and users.