Index insurance is a relatively new but innovative approach to insurance provision that pays out benefits on the basis of a pre determined index (e.g. rainfall level) for loss of assets and investments, primarily working capital, resulting from weather and catastrophic events, without requiring the traditional services of insurance claims assessors. It also allows for the claims settlement processes to be quicker and more objective. Before the start of the insurance period, a statistical index is developed measuring deviations from the normal level of parameters such as rainfall, temperature...

Long-term crop insurance is operated across more than 200 million hectares of agricultural land around the world. For more than 35 years, valuable experience has been gathered on this crop insurance system. Munich Re has filtered out the characteristics of the system which are responsible for its longterm success and defined them as a 'best practice' for crop insurance: SystemAgro: The framework is provided by a public private partnership designed on insurance principles. All insurance-related conditions which are important for securing the growing of agricultural crops are governed by laws and regulations. These are, for example: access to insurance, covering the insurance requirement at reasonable premiums or transparency of insurance conditions and claims handling.