Release of White Paper on EO for insurances

The Challenges of Index Insurance: Best practices for the Earth Observation Sector

Last year, we published a blog post on defining EO best practices to support the agro-insurance industry. As a continuation, VITO and its partners Agroinsurance International and GeoVille kept working on a best-practices document specifically for index insurances. It is with great pleasure that we can now announce that this white paper entitled “The Challenges of Agricultural Index Insurance: Best practices for the Earth Observation Sector” is available online.

This white paper gives an overview of the different types of index insurance, as well as the key challenges that are faced when developing and offering such an insurance. These challenges encompass meeting the needs of the customers, as well as reducing the basis risk as much as possible. It’s on the latter that EO data can play a very important role, for a number of basis risks types such as spatial variance and missing data.

While EO data can bring huge volumes of historic and near-real-time data to the index insurance products, it’s operational integration remains a challenging task. In this white paper we therefore share best practices on the use of EO in index insurance products. These are based on past experiences by the partners, as well as from literature and feedback from the insurance industry.

This white paper is dedicated to both the agro-insurance and EO sector to raise awareness on possibilities, opportunities and challenges. The main author, Roman Shynkarenko (AgroInsurance International), presented the white paper at the AgroInsurance International Conference. 

• Related blog: Earth observation best practices for agro-insurance
• AgroInsurance Conference: https://agroinsconf.com