Periodic Reporting for period 3 - BEACON (Boosting Agricultural Insurance based on Earth Observation data)
Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2022-01-31
Agricultural Insurance (AgI) sector is the most weather-dependent sector among insurance services. The premiums calculations and the development of new products are highly depending on the continuously changing climate and the high variability of extreme weather events, for which such historic records are absent or not sufficiently accurate. In addition, the damage assessment and the handling of claims is rather costly including high operational and administrative costs, since the verification of a claim requires on-the-spot inspections. Most of the times, the results of such inspections are controversial, since the final estimations are performed by inspectors who by human nature are less objective and less independent, making the assessments partially based, resulting in higher costs for the AgI companies. BEACON is a commercial toolbox of services that couples cutting edge EO technology with weather intelligence and blockchain technology, providing to the AgI companies with a robust and cost-efficient set of services allowing them to alleviate the effect of weather uncertainty when estimating risk of AgI products; reduce the number of on-site visits for claim verification; reduce operational and administrative costs for monitoring of insured indexes and contract handling; and design more accurate and personalized contracts.
During the previous reporting periods, a lot of effort has been put into the services development, calibration and validation in order to provide satisfactory results through a set of automated and/ or semi-automated EO processing workflows and advanced crop growth simulation models. BEACON managed to engage 17 AgI actors in the "co-creation" process, empowering the development of guidelines and requirements coming from the AgI sector at global scale. In addition, BEACON successfully completed two pilot implementation iterations testing and validating the BEACON toolbox. Specifically, the results derived from BEACON have been monitored through alerts/notifications that were produced by the toolbox and visualised to the end-users and validated based on the feedback that the scientific and technical teams gathered.
The main outcomes of this process are that BEACON managed to increase the accuracy of the risk assessment by 60% and achieve a 100% acceptance of data rate and information availability. Regarding the AgI process cycle-time, it is clearly stated that the BEACON toolbox could offer a significant reduction of the cycle-time, especially for contracts that covered calamities such as frost, flood, fire and windstorms, where the AgI actors could now complete the evaluation and the compensation of a farmer within a week (compared to 1-3 and 6 months that was the traditionally needed period). For the insured parcels under hail, BEACON offered a more accurate evaluation of damage under 40 days following the extreme weather event, bringing again time savings, even of less extent. On average it is estimated that the achieved AgI Process cycle-time decrease varies between 95% to 70%. Similarly, the automation achieved within the AgI companies level reached more than 90% and could be increased further where the BEACON toolbox integrates directly with already utilized ERP and SAP systems.
In overall, BEACON offers 9 products (Health monitoring, Crop yield estimation, Burned crop area detection, Standing water-flood detection, Drought assessment, Biomass estimation, Real-time and Historical Climate Data, Weather forecasts/ Weather Risk Probability, Seasonal Yield Prediction), formatting the core elements of the BEACON toolbox; those services included: Crop monitoring, Damage Assessment Calculator, Damage Prevention/ Prognosis, Early warning system, Weather forecast, Parcel Anti-Fraud Inspector, Blockchain/Smart Contracts.
The main outcomes of this process are that BEACON managed to increase the accuracy of the risk assessment by 60% and achieve a 100% acceptance of data rate and information availability. Regarding the AgI process cycle-time, it is clearly stated that the BEACON toolbox could offer a significant reduction of the cycle-time, especially for contracts that covered calamities such as frost, flood, fire and windstorms, where the AgI actors could now complete the evaluation and the compensation of a farmer within a week (compared to 1-3 and 6 months that was the traditionally needed period). For the insured parcels under hail, BEACON offered a more accurate evaluation of damage under 40 days following the extreme weather event, bringing again time savings, even of less extent. On average it is estimated that the achieved AgI Process cycle-time decrease varies between 95% to 70%. Similarly, the automation achieved within the AgI companies level reached more than 90% and could be increased further where the BEACON toolbox integrates directly with already utilized ERP and SAP systems.
In overall, BEACON offers 9 products (Health monitoring, Crop yield estimation, Burned crop area detection, Standing water-flood detection, Drought assessment, Biomass estimation, Real-time and Historical Climate Data, Weather forecasts/ Weather Risk Probability, Seasonal Yield Prediction), formatting the core elements of the BEACON toolbox; those services included: Crop monitoring, Damage Assessment Calculator, Damage Prevention/ Prognosis, Early warning system, Weather forecast, Parcel Anti-Fraud Inspector, Blockchain/Smart Contracts.
The uniqueness of BEACON is its holistic approach, integrating several technological and methodological innovation to every step, delivering a novel versatile tool to be used by all AgI providers. BEACON by leveraging EO data goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in using EO data for crop and weather monitoring, in risk and exposure assessment, in performing claim and handling processes more efficiently, in fraud detection, in indices development, in EO services development, etc. while transforming traditional AgI to innovative EO enabled AgI services and processes. Specifically, BEACON
• advances the inclusion of EO satellites within the AgI processes by delivering a solution that eases the adoption of EO data, maximizing the use of derived added value services without the hassle of previous implementations;
• develops a fully automated operational processing chain for EO data including download, preprocessing, standardized EO based product generation and storage that provides efficient information supply to both added value services and final users;
• adopts a smart contract and blockchain technology which will low the operational and administrative costs by transforming traditional processes to automated ones.
• advances the inclusion of EO satellites within the AgI processes by delivering a solution that eases the adoption of EO data, maximizing the use of derived added value services without the hassle of previous implementations;
• develops a fully automated operational processing chain for EO data including download, preprocessing, standardized EO based product generation and storage that provides efficient information supply to both added value services and final users;
• adopts a smart contract and blockchain technology which will low the operational and administrative costs by transforming traditional processes to automated ones.