Protection gap for agribusiness with soil moisture parametric insurance

Soil moisture, Drought, Insurance & Banking

AXA Climate and VanderSat entered a strategic partnership to offer a satellite data-driven parametric cover against drought-related losses. The parametric insurance product features policies that will pay out based on high-precision microwave technology measuring soil moisture in individual field zones.

Soil Moisture is a direct indicator of water available for the plant hence being closely linked to yield volatility. Contrary to conventional insurance policies that rely on loss adjustment in the field, AXA Climate uses VanderSat’s satellite monitoring to trigger swift payouts as soon as the index is above or below a certain level. This means no costly farm visits to assess the losses and payouts can quickly reach impacted clients. AXA Climate’s innovative risk management solution is available worldwide for actors of the agribusiness supply chain: input suppliers, processors and cooperatives.

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Antoine Denoix, AXA (CEO AXA Climate):

“Integration of VanderSat’s satellite data into our product offering will allow us to make claims’ processing much faster and smoother for our clients”.

Dr. Richard de Jeu, VanderSat (founder and CTO): “One major advantage of microwave sensing is that cloud cover does not interfere with the measurement from space. We have been collecting daily information on soil moisture from different satellites for many years. As a result, we now have an archive of data that goes back to more than 18 years. These elements in combination with high-resolution sensing make AXA Climate’s satellite-derived products highly reliable for providing a flexible and cost-effective insurance policy to its customers”.