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<p>Agricultural Insurance (AgI) sector is expanding on a global scale and is projected to grow by €50 B, by 2020. This rapid growth is driven by a set of fundamental structural changes directly affecting the agricultural sector like more frequent and severe extreme weather events, growing global population and intensification of production systems. Insurance solutions are set to grow in importance for agricultural management, given that agriculture will continue to be increasingly dependent on risk financing support. However, the development and provision of insurance services/products in the agricultural sector is generally low as compared to other sectors of the economy, and in their majority, suffer from low market penetration.</p><p>In that frame, the BEACON toolbox was born, that aims to provide insurance companies with a robust and cost-efficient set of services that will allow them i) to alleviate the effect of weather uncertainty when estimating risk of AgI products; ii) to reduce the number of on-site visits for claim verification; iii) to reduce operational and administrative costs for monitoring of insured indices and contract handling; and iv) to design more accurate and personalized contracts. Specifically, BEACON scales-up on EO data and Weather Intelligence components, couples them with blockchain, to deliver the required functions for Weather Prediction and Assessment and Smart Contracts and offer the required services:</p><ul><li>Crop Monitoring, which provides contract profiling and crop monitoring data together with yield estimations.</li> <li>Damage Assessment Calculator, which supports AgI companies in better assess and calculate damage to proceed with indemnity pay-outs of claims.</li> <li>Anti-fraud Inspector, which allows AgI to automatically check the legitimacy of a claim submitted.</li> <li>Weather Risk Probability, which provides probabilities maps of extreme weather events that may occur in the upcoming season.</li> <li>Damage Prevention/ Prognosis – Early Warning System, which provides extreme weather alerts to AgI providers and their customers.</li> </ul><p>This work focuses on the Damage Assessment Calculator component. It provides an approach using different types of EO data, implemented in the operational workflow of BEACON that can be used by AgI companies to improve the prediction and crop loss assessment due to drought and hailstorms.</p><p> </p><p>Acknowledgements</p><p>This  project  has  received  funding  from  the  European  Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 821964 (BEACON).</p>

BEACON is a market-led project that couples cutting edge Earth Observation (EO) technology with weather intelligence and blockchain to deliver a toolbox for the Agricultural Insurance (AgI) sector with timely cost-efficient and actionable insights for the agri-insurance industry. BEACON enables insurance companies to exploit the untapped market potential of AgI, while contributing to the redefinition of existing AgI products and services. The Damage Assessment Calculator of BEACON employs remote sensing techniques in order to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of agri-insurance by: i) increasing the objectivity of the experts field inspections; ii) reducing the cost of field visits and iii) increasing farmers' confidence in the estimation results, given the significant economic impact of erroneous estimation. This paper provides an analysis of different type of EO data and remote sensing techniques implemented in the operational workflow of BEACON that can be used by AgI companies to provide safe and reliable results on storms, floods, wildfires and droughts damage on crops.

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