Life ADA Project - Online on the United Nations SDG Action website the article Helping Italian farmers adapt to climate change through innovations in insurance
The article Helping Italian farmers adapt to climate change through innovations in insurance has been published on the United Nations SDG Action website, by Marisa Parmigiani - Head of Sustainability and Stakeholder Management of Unipol Group, leader of the Life ADA (ADaptation in Agriculture) project, which CREA joined with its Research Centre for Agricultural Policies and Bioeconomy.
SDG Action is a new initiative launched by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) to support the UN’s Decade of Action – the program that provides accelerated solutions for all the major challenges related to climate action and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs in the English acronym), to be addressed by 2030.
In the pages of SDG Action, which feature articles from world-leading experts on all aspects of the SDGs and climate action, Life ADA Project, launched in Italy in autumn 2020, finds its ideal venue, aiming to transfer knowledge to farmers and producer organizations on climate scenarios, risk, management and adaptive measures to enhance their capacity of tackling current and future climate risks.
Marisa Parmigiani cites data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), according to which, Italy’s economic losses from climate extremes are among the worst in the EU. Predicted changes in climate over the next few decades will strongly influence the development of Europe’s agricultural sector and its production dynamics.
The scale of climate change, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, and the difficulty in predicting future climate scenarios, now present huge challenges to farmers. Climate change directly impacts agricultural yields, putting farmers’ revenues and their survival as viable businesses at risk – explains Parmigiani.
There is an urgent need, therefore, to implement climate change adaptation strategies, both on the farm and value chain level, making innovative insurance tools available.
EU and specifically Italian agriculture are characterized by a wide range of high-value foods that boast with high quality in terms of food safety, nutritional, cultural, and heritable value. Consumer demand is pushing towards products with geographical indication (GI) or organic quality marks.
Insurers must play a triple role ̶ continues Parmigiani: 1. as risk carriers, through the traditional role of risk transfer; 2. as risk managers, to boost communities’ resilience by fostering customers’ capacity-building, and incentivizing virtuous risk reduction and adaptive interventions; as investors, to fund climate change adaptation.
A decision support tool will be available to help farmers in defining efficient adaptation plans on both farm and supply chain level. And, by building capacity on risk reduction, the project will foster insurer innovation in maintaining farmers’ insurability in the long-term, despite the increase in catastrophic and systemic risks.