Reporter Guo Xiaojie intern Ning Yihan
Since April this yearGratisfreespinsAbnormally continuous rainfall in Guangdong and other places has put a lot of pressure on property insurance companies.
Relevant data show that in only 10 days from April 19 to 28, Guangdong insurance institutions reported a cumulative loss of 6. 5%.GratisfreespinsOf this total, 157 million yuan was reported by agricultural insurance and 76 million yuan by catastrophe insurance, accounting for 22.46% and 10.87%, respectively.
The rapid response of the insurance industry to climate disasters has effectively played the role of shock absorbers, but in the face of increasingly high-frequency climate disaster events, how to accurately predict risks in advance and do a good job in risk reduction services is a major problem faced by insurance companies.
Insurance risk reduction is that insurance companies take the initiative to intervene in the risk management of the insured subject matter in advance by using professional and advanced scientific and technological means to reduce the total social risk by reducing the probability of accidents.
Moving risk management forward plays a positive role in improving the anti-risk ability of the society. In recent years, regulators have also put forward specific guidelines and requirements for risk reduction services. In 2023, the former China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission issued the opinions on the active Development of risk reduction Service in the property Insurance Industry, which proposed that risk reduction Service is one of the effective means for the property insurance industry to serve the development of the real economy. In April this year, the State Financial Supervision and Administration and other departments issued the guidance on promoting the High-quality Development of Green Insurance, pointing out that insurance companies should provide a package of risk reduction and loss protection insurance schemes. we will strengthen the development and management of green insurance products, the management of risk reduction and the building of professional teams for claims settlement.
In fact, in the past years, insurance companies have made many successful explorations in the field of disaster prevention and mitigation with the help of the Internet of things, big data and other technologies. In recent years, insurance companies have also focused on "microclimate" risks on the basis of preventing "macro-climate" risks, "intensive cultivation" in industries vulnerable to climate, such as agricultural insurance, and moving the risk barrier forward.
Several interviewees said that at present, the insurance industry has gradually explored a mature cooperation path with the agricultural sector and third-party science and technology service companies to enable risk reduction, and with the development of big data, artificial intelligence and the gradual maturity of the data element trading market, there is still a lot of room for imagination in the future.
Digital means to help reduce risk
With the frequent occurrence of climate warming and natural disasters, early warning of climate risk through technical means has become one of the main means for insurance companies to enhance risk reduction services.
The reporter combed the ESG report of listed insurance companies and found that many insurance companies were actively involved in meteorological risk management, relying on the Internet of things, big data system and other technologies to develop a systematic risk reduction service platform.
For example, the Hawkeye system and disaster emergency service platform independently developed by Ping an property Insurance include 8 kinds of disaster risk maps such as typhoon and rainstorm and 15 kinds of disaster early warning, with an average accuracy of more than 70% and an advance time of more than 48 hours. According to statistics, Ping an issued a total of 8.57 billion early warning messages in 2023, covering 87.04 million individuals and corporate customers.
The ESG report of Ping an Insurance in 2023 shows that since its launch, Hawkeye system has achieved remarkable results in risk early warning, disaster reduction and loss reduction. Ping an has reduced disaster losses of hundreds of millions of yuan for the government, enterprises and individuals in various types of insurance.
On the other hand, PICC property Insurance has created a "Vientiane" risk reduction service platform and a risk reduction service sub-platform in 12 professional areas, widely applying satellite remote sensing, UAV, Internet of things, blockchain, Al intelligent identification and other technologies to various fields. In 2023, PICC carried out risk screening in advance on 22700 urban waterlogging risk points and 23900 non-car insurance customers before extreme weather, sent 12 million risk warning text messages to car insurance customers, and provided 180 million risk warning times for operating trucks.
A number of technical service providers of insurance companies told reporters that the industry usually divides the types of climate disasters into "macroclimate" and "microclimate". In view of the large-scale meteorological disasters such as typhoons and torrential rains, insurance companies have usually set up systematic risk reduction technology systems; and as insurance companies pay more attention to rural revitalization and green insurance, digital technologies such as the Internet of things have also begun to go deep into the "microclimate" risk reduction work of agriculture with local characteristics.
Agriculture has always been "dependent on heaven for a living". According to the relevant report of the United Nations in 2023, agriculture accounted for 23 per cent of the total meteorological disaster losses in all sectors; more than 65 per cent of the losses caused by drought occurred in the agricultural sector, while about 20 per cent of the losses caused by floods, storms and hurricanes occurred in the agricultural sector. Therefore, to carry out risk reduction services in agricultural insurance has become a hot spot of exploration for insurance companies in recent years.
Yi Binhong, founder of Guangzhou Greater Climate Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Greater Climate Agriculture") and CEO, believes that agricultural production will face risks such as natural disasters, so insurance plays an important role. At present, there have been many practices of disaster prevention and mitigation in the field of characteristic agriculture, and these practices are usually carried out around the daily agricultural production scene.
Yi Binhong said, for example, that the Internet of things data acquisition equipment "Nongyan" intelligent monitoring system independently developed by Greater Climate Agriculture can accurately collect rainfall, typhoons and other meteorological disasters and has been used in characteristic agricultural counties such as Yunan, Guangdong. On the one hand, the application of intelligent monitoring system can assist local farmers in timely scientific and large-scale disaster early warning, on the other hand, it also reduces the compensation pressure on insurance companies to collect claims information.
Similar cases have become more and more popular in the field of agricultural risk management in recent years.
In 2023, China property Insurance set up the "Lianzhou Caixin big data platform", applying "insurance + technology" to disaster prevention and mitigation, providing disaster prevention and damage prevention services such as satellite remote sensing, UAV flight prevention and meteorological early warning, to provide guarantee for the whole production and sales process of the local characteristic cabbage industry. In Zhanjiang and other places, the "Wisdom vegetable Garden" service project of China property Insurance carries out real-time monitoring of important parameters in the process of crop growth, such as environmental conditions, crop growth, disasters, diseases and insect pests, so as to improve the ability to resist risks in agricultural production, and effectively help farmers to effectively improve the agricultural ecological environment and improve the level of agricultural production.
Taking Zengcheng characteristic agricultural product litchi as an example, in the face of local meteorological disasters in different aspects such as cooling and rainfall that may occur in the litchi period, insurance companies, third-party companies, agricultural bureaus and other parties form a linkage relationship between upstream and downstream. After combining the monitoring information of the Internet of things with expert guidance, the information is reached to farmers through a variety of early warning methods.
Wang Ruolin, deputy general manager of Guangdong Manyun Union Technology Co., Ltd., said that in the "microclimate" subdivision of local areas, the Internet of things technology can accurately predict local climate risks and help farmers take effective measures by predicting weather changes and potential natural disasters and providing early warning information in a timely manner. These early warning messages are transmitted to farmers from offline to online, and many of the early warning messages are conveyed by local agricultural departments and insurance companies.
Therefore, the intensive investment of insurance companies into these projects which did not seem to have much to do with insurance companies in the past has actually provided precise support for the promotion of risk reduction services. The ecology of the tripartite linkage of the government, insurance companies and data technology service providers to effectively reduce the negative impact of meteorological disasters on agricultural development has gradually matured.
Big data and AI have a huge application space.
In fact, there are many cases of application of Internet of things and other technologies in the field of agricultural insurance at home and abroad, but with the development of big data and AI technology, the exploration of agricultural risk management with multi-technology integration is still continuing. Especially with the gradual maturity of the data factor market, public data is expected to play an important role in the field of insurance risk management.
Big data's product "Enterprise Environmental Protection Bao", which is sold on the Guangzhou data Exchange and bought by an insurance company, is one of them. Pan Yitu, a senior industry expert from Guangdong Cornett Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., told reporters that taking environmental liability insurance as an example, since the launch of environmental liability insurance in 2007, due to the lack of effective public data support and other reasons, enterprises are not willing to buy, the compensation rate is low, and the effect of insurance promotion is not ideal.
Pan Yitu said that with the improvement of legislation in the field of data elements and the gradual maturity of the data trading market, the public data accumulated by the government began to circulate in the market, thus opening up a new pattern of environmental liability insurance.
"at present, the enterprise environmental protection treasure has been incorporated into the public big data, which is both dynamic and static, such as enterprise environmental impact assessment, sewage discharge permit, online monitoring and so on. in addition, factors such as the stock of high-risk substances in the raw materials produced by the enterprise, whether the enterprise pollution control is advanced, whether the environment is sensitive, and the environmental performance of the enterprise in the past are included in the assessment process of the risk level of environmental emergencies. It effectively supports the pre-insurance pricing, in-insurance risk control and post-insurance claim settlement of the new ring liability insurance, which greatly reduces the workload of manual exploration of insurance companies and leads to risk management. After a series of product improvement, the comprehensive compensation rate of the new ring liability insurance of an insurance company has risen from less than 2% to about 70%. " Pan Yitu said.
Therefore, many people in the industry believe that public data has great development value, and if social data and public data can be integrated in the future, so that data mining, data processing and data application are closely linked, it will provide a more accurate reference for all-round disaster prevention and reduction.
In addition to the breadth of data, the accuracy and depth of data also affect the effective application of big data in agricultural risk control model.
Yi Binhong said that at present, the "agricultural eye" intelligent monitoring points of the Internet of things laid by climate agriculture exceed 11000 agricultural production and operation entities, covering an area of 11 million mu, and the installation of sensors also exceeds 200000 volumes. Big data coverage of the Internet of things is among the leading levels in the world. Even so, the accuracy and breadth of big data's Internet of things in China is still in its infancy. The continuity and validity of future data is the key direction of big data and AI enabling insurance risk management in the future.
At present, the retrospective years of domestic historical meteorological data are relatively short, and the trading of meteorological public data is still in its infancy, which to a certain extent affects the application of Meteorological big data and the development of AI model. In addition, the flow of data assets in many industries is fragmented, and industry standards and consensus need to be further unified. " Yi Binhong said.
In terms of data accuracy, Yi Binhong told reporters that the current climate early warning data information mainly includes "sky, ground, air" three aspects of data. For example, if the same piece of land is collected by soil sensors, meteorological sensors and other sensors, there may be differences in the local climatic environment of different topographic heights and different geographical locations, which puts forward higher requirements for the subdivision accuracy of the three kinds of data.
Although limited by the richness, breadth and validity of data, the application scenarios of big data and AI technology in agricultural risk management still need to be cultivated, but many insurance companies have been actively entering the market in advance.
Wang Ruolin told reporters that at present, many insurance companies apply AI technology to popular science education scenes for farmers, such as providing customized learning content and suggestions to help farmers improve production efficiency and risk awareness. With the admission of effective big data and the increase of R & D investment in more subdivided application scenarios by insurance companies, the application of AI technology in insurance risk reduction service will be more in-depth. For example, by using AI+ agricultural expert guidance + machine learning technology to monitor and predict crop growth and the occurrence probability of diseases and insect pests in real time, to help farmers optimize crop management and reduce losses, so as to reduce insurance claims and pesticide use, there is a huge room for imagination in the application scenario.