ADASCIS

During next years, European farms probably will have to face with an increasing instability of their incomes.  Farmers will be more and more exposed to risks related to prices and to climate change. Risks related to prices variability were minimized up to now by the EU thanks to markets and prices support policies. Today, the progressive diminution in agricultural subsidies and the suppression of guaranteed prices expose the European agriculture to the uncontrolled evolution of the world market prices.

As a result of climate change, climatic risks tend to increase with the multiplication of extreme climatic events (droughts, heat strokes, violent rains, storms), inducing greater yield variations.  Farms specialization increases their sensitivity to climatic risks and reinforces the need for improving revenue protection mechanisms.  In this context, a better natural risks management is needed, because combined with the prices risks, they can generate significant incomes risks.

A recent regulation of the European Commission (1857/2006) makes possible for member states to compensate farmers for losses caused by adverse meteorological conditions which can be assimilated to natural disasters. It proposes the use of agricultural insurances to supplement the state Disaster Funds.

In Belgium, some agricultural risks are covered by the Disaster Funds. The Federal Minister of Economy, Independent Professions and Energy, which is in charge of its management, wishes to improve the system in order to guarantee a better reactivity in case of crises and to increase efficiency in the claims management. In particular, it would like to decrease time in the disaster identification procedure, to facilitate the eligibility of the compensation demands, to ensure a uniformity in the claims treatment and in the estimate of losses, and finally to reduce the payment delay.

By improving the management of the Disaster Fund procedure, and by implementing a specific decision support system, public authorities will also offers opportunities for new policies development by supplying yield risks information to the Belgian insurances sector. The supply of reliable historical crop data, making it possible to define risk levels, will facilitate a successful implementation of new tools and the development of new crop insurance products.

Today information coming from Earth Observation is widely used to forecast crop yields. This information source can also be used for the management of financial aids to farmers in case of losses due to meteorological accidents.

This project focused on the development of tools and operational services for the Federal Ministry of Economy, SMEs, Self-employed and Energy to identify risk areas and to evaluate agricultural damages in case of disaster. The development of an application, using information resulting from remote sensing and agrometeorological data provides a more precise natural damage assessment.

In the broader context of agricultural insurances, the service will make it possible to define the requirements for the development of new insurance products which meet private sector (insurers, farmers) and public administrations' needs.

 1) Analysis of user's needs and study of the existing products and services

In a first phase, the project attempted to describe the general European context of crop insurance schemes and to define the needs of the Federal Ministry of Economy, SMEs, Self-employed and Energy and of the private insurance sector.

This phase was essential to determine which information was necessary to develop a crop damage information system. The development of the system has also taken into account the technical constraints related to the implementation of the system and the use of Earth Observation data. Simultaneously, the analysis of existing insurance products and of crop risk information systems present in other countries helped us to define products and services adapted to the Belgian market.

2) Selection of crop risk indices

An important phase of the project was the selection of relevant crop risk indices. These indices were derived from meteorological data, agrometeorological models and remote sensing information based on medium or low resolution satellite data.  These indices were compared with reference values established on historical data. At regional level, the calculation of indices with data coming from low or medium resolution satellites were used to identify higher risk areas with recurring problems (delay of growth, low outputs, and low soil moisture).

3) Generation of a crop risk indices database

In the development phase a selection of risk indices were calculated at different levels and implemented in a reference database: 

•  At municipality level the aggregation of data from Earth observation, B-CGMS and LPIS, made it possible to calculate indices and retrieve information on a given municipality and compare the current situation with historical data. The prototype allowed to create damage maps and risks maps.
•  A detailed study, using high resolution satellite imagery and SAR images, was carried out on two test sites to evaluate the results obtained from the medium resolution observations.

4) Development of a crop risk information system

A user interface prototype was developed to enable users to retrieve information at municipality level. This system allows quantifying and visualizing different damage indicators and risk factors on maps.