Café 17 – Parametric Insurance for Sustainable Development

By Emily Adams, NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration SERVIR; Sevtap Kestel, Professor of Actuarial Science, Middle East Technical University, Turkey.

Host: Corina Constantinescu, University of Liverpool, UK.

Panelists: Séverine Arnold, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; Ida Ferrara and Ed Furman, York University, Canada.

Parametric (or index-based) insurance covers the probability of a predefined event happening instead of indemnifying the actual loss incurred. For instance, it uses a satellite-based index of expected livestock losses to determine payouts.  Emily Adams will speak about SERVIR, a joint initiative that "connects space to the village", when using Earth observations and NASA data to inform resilient development of (parametric) insurance. Prof Sevtap Kestel will talk about the lessons learned when pricing crop revenue (parametric) insurance on the Turkish market.