Over the last 30 years, the world has lost an estimated $3.8 trillion to disasters caused by
natural hazards.
Disasters mainly affect the poor, threatening to roll back gains in
economic and social well-being worldwide, and erasing decades of development progress
overnight. The increasing stresses on the society posed by uncontrolled socio-economic
development and by climate change erode its resilience to shocks like catastrophic events.
To face this situation a combination of action needs to be put in place that encompasses
risk reduction/mitigation, risk retention and risk transfer.
Risk transfer mechanisms such as insurances are an important contribution to this risk
management activity as they enable the different risk management component to be put inbackground: #00fbd5;
place especially in countries with a limited risk retention capacity.
That is the case of the study area considered in e-Drift.
South-East and South Asia countries with middle-low incomes suffer regular losses due to
weather related events, principally floods due to monsoons and hurricane systems.
The implementation of Disaster Risk Management and the rapid response financing in the wake
of a natural disaster, requires a deep knowledge of the environmental situation, the
potential affected areas, infrastructure and people. EO based services deliver essential
information to evaluate the status of preparedness, to define measures to enhance the
disaster prevention or about situation analysis of an event for an efficient emergency
response.
The Project: e-Drift (Disaster RIsk Financing and Transfer) project aims to create a strong network between providers of value-added services utilizing EO data, In-Sector service providers for the insurance market and reinsurance companies with the final purpose to create new or improved products and solutions for the Insurance sector. The e-Drift project consortium includes leading companies in the EO value adding, and leading actors in the insurance market.
LIST, responsible of the flood area detection algorithms.
DLR, responsible of the population characterization layers.
Deltares responsible for the integration of EO data into hydrologic/hydraulic model results.
Swiss Re major reinsurance company and in sector provider.
RMS in sector provider and world leading company in cat modelling for insurance market.
The
World Bank will be guiding the user needs
assessment for institutional clients that would like to manage their sovereign risk.
This development is directly connected with a client platform providing parametric
insurance against flood in South East Asia developed with the support of the World Bank.
The SEA DRIF platform will integrate services from eDrift into its web client to trigger
insurance payments in case of flooding in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.
The Virtual Platform enables an easy and timely access to various services and products
guaranteeing high computing capability and direct access to the EO datasets of the Sentinel
constellation. Services will cover several key areas of interest of the insurance market and
of Countries that would like to transfer their sovereign risk.
The e-Drift Virtual Platform will be released as a PAAS, so that can be embedded in the IT
systems of the In-Sector Providers, and as a SAAS, so that can be used by In-Sector Providers by
a unique and KISS End User Interface.
The virtual platform is heavily based on already existent platforms and SW that have been
developed and tested throughout the years the key ones being: WASDI providing middleware and
backend services, RASOR providing libraries for the impact computations, ESA Urban TEP and ESA
GPOD providing computing services and products.
