Insurtech Snapshot: Introducing unique risk assessment tools for crop (re)insurers and producers
Cash crops are agricultural crops grown to be sold for profit, so losses on cash crops due to weather-related events such as flood, drought, hail, can produce a large financial impact to producers, customers, regional economies and (re)insurers.
Risk assessment and consequent risk management and (re)insurance is necessary to keep producers safer from the financial effects of extreme weather events. A key element of risk assessment is exposure mapping, but mapping agricultural resources on a large scale can be costly and does not always provide the level of superior data required for crop risk assessment. Additionally, historical datasets for risk assessment of natural disaster financing or (re)insurance mechanisms are not always accurate, especially for developing countries where organized, systematic data collection cannot always be guaranteed due to lack of resources or structural issues.
New Risk Assessment Tools
Ticinum Aerospace (TA) has developed a novel technique of merging mapping methods and creating new global datasets – this technique helps (re)insurers manage mapping costs and provide superior data for crop risk assessment. Furthermore, agro-climatic mapping provides crop producers and (re)insurers with another useful risk assessment tool: the identification of crops that “potentially could grow according to their aptitude and potential agricultural production with respect of the actual environmental conditions”.
A snapshot of how this particular crop risk-mapping tool was created is summarized in the company’s scientific paper published on 14 February 2018 (Link). The work described in this paper focuses on data development in the Caribbean/Central America area, but has been ultimately designed with a global perspective in mind in order to make it reusable anywhere else in the world. Furthermore, by collaborating with stellar partners (ERN from Mexico and RED from Italy), the partnership achieved the optimal balance between available resources, constraints and requirements.
Agricultural (re)insurers interested in enhancing risk assessment tools and creating global datasets should contact Ticinum Aerospace at info@ticinumaerospace.com.
Disclaimer: The author of this article is currently an Advisory Board Member at Ticinum Aerospace.
Citation: Dell’Acqua, F., Iannelli, G. C., Torres, M. A., & Martina, M. L. : A Novel Strategy for Very-Large-Scale Cash-Crop Mapping in the Context of Weather-Related Risk Assessment, Combining Global Satellite Multispectral Datasets, Environmental Constraints, and in-Situ Acquisition of Geospatial Data. Sensors 2018, 18(2), 591; doi:10.3390/s18020591