Comment on egusphere-2022-498

Abstract

The urgency of accelerating disaster risk resilience also promotes preferred systematic reviews of the methods for design and evaluation of risk transfer tools. This paper aims to provide a state-of-art weather index insurance design, thereby including methods for natural hazards’ indices calculation, vulnerability assessment and risk pricing. We applied the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) using the Scopus database. First, 364 peer-reviewed articles from 2010 to present were screened for a bibliometric analysis and then, the 34 most cited articles from the past five years were systematically analyzed. Our results demonstrate that despite a great research effort on index insurance, the majority of them focused on food insecurity through agricultural and crop insurance. Also, climate change and basis risks were found highly relevant for weather index insurance, but weakly developed, suggesting challenges around food insecurity. Special focus was given to drought hazards, while other hazards such as temperature variation, excessive rainfall and wildfires were slightly covered. Emerging areas, namely agricultural, hydrological, and sustainable index insurance found promissory for insurance. Also, current state-of-the-art lacks methods for incorporating multi-hazard risk evaluation in vulnerability assessment and risk pricing. Most studies considered only single-hazard risk, and the multi-hazard risk studies assumed independence between hazards. Thus, we summarized the most common methods for calculating indices, estimating losses using indices, pricing risks, and evaluating insurance index policies. This review promotes a starting point in weather index insurance design towards a multi-hazard resilient society.