At a time when heatwaves and droughts keep increasing, forest fires are becoming commonplace and groundwater is depleting, it’s only natural to ask how we can anticipate the future and better prepare for it. This is where the PIISA project (Piloting Innovative Insurance Solutions for Adaptation) comes into play.
Launched in June 2023 in Helsinki, PIISA is a 36-month project coordinated by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and funded by the European Union as well as the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). It aims to develop and deploy a range of innovative insurance solutions to cover at least 50% of losses attributable to climate change effects in Europe. Climate adaptation is high on the European economic and political agenda, and their strategy on adaptation has four principal objectives: to make adaptation smarter, swifter and more systemic all the while boosting international action on adaptation to climate change.
Bringing together 12 partners from five European countries, the project will co-develop climate resilient insurance portfolios with the help of three insurance companies, and map out different solutions to share climate risk data and the losses due to climate disruption. These insurance companies will actively participate in the insurance pilots conducted in the following countries: France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
The project has three main objectives:
- Preparing and planning for climate resilience, to provide additional open access to risk data, replicable insurance concepts, and related context-sensitised business models.
- Accelerating transformations to climate resilience, through a SMART replication system.
- Demonstrating systemic transformations to climate resilience, by showing the feasibility and effectiveness of recently initiated insurance solutions.
There are five focal sectors which will be benefiting from the project: insurance services for agriculture; a dashboard of insurance solutions for cities and citizens to protect their well-being; green roof insurances; forest insurances to prevent selected biotic and abiotic risks; and wildfire insurances enhancing adaptive actions. Innovations will be transferred to other eligible sectors as well as to other regions and countries beyond the project’s scope, hoping to prevent and/or insure hazards such as floods, droughts, fires, and various types of storms (hailstorms, tornados, etc). Bringing together a large number of different and complimentary end-users, PIISA hopes to incite households, firms, and public authorities to set up and create adaptation promoting conditions.
LGI is taking part in several tasks in the project. We will be contributing and leading communication and outreach activities, with the overall objective of maximizing the impact of the programme. This includes raising awareness of climate adaptation, disseminating pilot results, and engaging communities around a common vision and mission to stimulate engagement towards innovative climate insurance solutions. LGI will also be contributing to the set-up, coordination and validation of piloting the five focal sectors, and are tasked with replicability and exploitation of the pilot results in order to create a roadmap to help spread the project’s innovations.
We invite you to visit the PIISA project website here. You can also follow project updates on its social media channels.
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