Insuring Weather Risks in European Agriculture

Smart insurance designs (e.g. tailoring insurances to the individual farm) and technological progress (e.g. advances in satellite technology) enable improvements in insurance schemes. Spatially and temporally more detailed information as well as better knowledge of the relationship between weather and yields losses can reduce basis risk of insurances. However, the use of new and better data does not automatically lead to better insurance schemes. The SURE-Farm project contributes to the understanding of weather risks and new insurance mechanisms as possible tools to increase the resilience of European agriculture to weather extremes. Therefore, we aim to show how to integrate newly available data sources for different agricultural outputs, namely grassland, crop and dairy production in different European regions. In the four contributions summarised here, we evaluate currently existing index insurance schemes and provide fundamental insights for future developments of index insurances for the crop and livestock sector in Europe. We first summarise and discuss existing index-based weather insurances. Second, we investigate the drought risk reduction potential of different drought indicators in two case studies on different crops in Eastern Germany. Third, we examine the relationship between hot and humid weather and milk yield losses for dairy producers in Flanders.