InsuranceGrass: Assessment of formal, natural and social insurances: how to cope best with impacts of extreme events on grasslands for sustainable farming systems?
Motivation
The impacts of climate change pose one of the main challenges for agriculture in Central Europe. In particular, an increase of extreme and compound extreme events (i.e. joint extremes of multiple climatic variables) is expected to strongly impact economic revenues and the provision of ecosystem services by agroecosystems. A highly relevant, still open question is how grassland farming systems can cope best with these climate risks. A prominently discussed economic instrument to relieve income risks is the formal insurance, but natural and social insurances are newly under discussion as well. Thus, in order to assess these new forms of insurances, more information is needed.
Objectives
With external pagefour sub-projectscall_made, InsuranceGrass takes an innovative interdisciplinary view and assesses formal, natural and social insurances: on how to cope best with impacts of climate extremes on grasslands, integrating social and natural sciences perspectives and feedbacks between them. Based on this holistic analysis, InsuranceGrass will provide recommendations for policy and insurance design to ensure effective risk-coping of farmers and to enhance sustainable grassland farming, considering economic, environmental and social aspects.
In our sub-project, we ask the question "What is the impact of extreme and compound extreme events on permanent grasslands and their provision of ecosystem services?". This will be investigated along three tasks:
- Compile a benchmark set of ecosystem services for permanent grasslands
- Characeterise extreme and compound extreme events
- Assess the impact of extreme and compound extreme events on the provision of ES