Planet and AXA Climate Extend Strategic Partnership to Drive Drought Insurance Program
Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced the extension of their strategic partnership with AXA Climate, a company that provides consulting services to the agri-food, industrial, financial and public sectors to help them successfully adapt to climate change and biodiversity loss, in a regenerative way. The extension aims to offer continued satellite data-driven insights for the development of parametric insurance products, which help protect farmers against the effects of drought on their livelihoods.
Based in Paris, France, AXA Climate, offers unique drought insurance services that estimate crop yield and losses and automatically trigger payouts within a few days of an end of a risk period. This enables farmers and agricultural stakeholders, such as suppliers and processors, to swiftly receive compensation and much-needed support during challenging times.
“With Planet’s unique satellite data, AXA Climate has been able to provide a high quality index insurance coverage service for farmers and cooperatives. We can now act quickly to help farmers and stakeholders combat the major threat of drought to agriculture around the world,” said Antoine Denoix, CEO of AXA Climate.
Planet owns and operates the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history, with approximately 200 satellites currently in orbit. The company collects an image of every land-based location on Earth on a near daily basis, generating an unprecedented dataset. These insights are combined with additional public satellite data offerings to deliver continuous, scientifically rigorous data that measures and quantifies the changing conditions of the surface of the Earth, including soil moisture.
Using Planet’s Planetary Variables Soil Water Content data feed, AXA Climate receives a measurement of the volume of water contained in soil at a high resolution in their areas of interest to a depth of about 5 centimeters. This critical information helps the insurance company determine risk for drought-related losses, such as crop yields. AXA Climate calculates a soil moisture index from this data, which serves as a reliable indicator of the amount of water available for crops. This index is closely associated with yield variability, making it an essential factor to consider in agriculture.
“These Planetary Variables provide accurate, daily, global measurements. AXA Climate is using our Soil Water Content variable to monitor, and then provide automatic payments if the soil moisture gets below a certain percent for more than a number of days. This offers a powerful service that can support global farmers in critical situations,” said Will Marshall, CEO of Planet. “Abstracting out critical measurables from satellite data enables our customers to reach larger value, enable new applications and thus more customers to get value from Planet’s data.”
Using Planet’s satellite data feeds, AXA Climate can obtain reliable, up-to-date soil moisture data across the world and even for remote regions. This year, the index insurance service started operating in southern and central Brazil. With this extended partnership, AXA Climate looks forward to expanding their services in the country as well as globally. While these insights have been critical for farmers, they have also proved to be valuable for developing new approaches to mitigate the effects of climate change beyond agriculture, such as monitoring natural disaster impact risk.