The Earth Observation Best Practice for Agro-Insurance (EO4I) project brings together both sectors to find out more about Agro-Insurance needs and inform agricultural insurers about current and future EO capabilities. Within this scope, three opportunities can be defined:

Opportunity 1: Currently available EO technology that is known to be suitable for addressing particular agricultural insurance requirements.

Opportunity 2: Currently available, but unrecognized EO capabilities that could give enhanced performance to the agricultural insurance sector.

Opportunity 3: EO technology, not currently available, which could solve future agricultural insurance needs and challenges.

To find out about the needs and capabilities, the project involves key industry partners from the Agro-Insurance sector: The Austrian Hail, Swiss Hail and Vereinigte Hail together forming the ASV working group. Several surveys, workshops and user meetings will lead to a best practice roadmap and guidelines for the use of EO data by the agro-insurance sector.


The following five “business processes” shall be considered when developing EO best practices guidelines:


The figure above shows a schematic representation of the best practice characteristics. The project enables the key users as well as the project team to rely on existing strategies, services definitions and allows the integration of existing knowledge and skills. However, it also enforces the design and development of new and improved functionalities, skills and strategies, which will lead to a sustainable success.