FORRE: Insurance incentives and risk pricing for adoption of adaptation

This presentation to Chinese eco2adapt collaborators held in Sanya, Hainan, summarised the progress of ForestRe ltd (FORRE) within the project to develop insurance policies that reward, via premium discounts, adaptative forest management as defence against a warming world. The slides form a framework for discussion at the event and are not self explanatory on their own.The opening slide summarises the long term causes of loss by hazard to our collaborating insurer over 20 years. Of the climate perils, just fire and wind together account for about 95% of all losses in forestry that is a landscape-scale enterprise. Insurance product designs are summarised as 'like-for-like' (indemnity) and index-based insurance (parametric) policies. Both these forms can respond to and reward adaptive behaviour in forest management, some information about which comes from the eco2adapt work on 'living labs'. At this stage in 2025 work had started on improved forest fire risk prevention measures, and what data is available the understanding needed to quantify the benefits. Examples of the work underway to answer these question are discussed and the methodologies used to measure fire risk. These are the basic principles.The presentation moves on to the the risk profiling of entire forest landscapes; How do we measure fire risk in forestry, the earth observation data used, its analysis and a case study? This is followed by high-level discussion on the issues of wind damage and the state of the interpretation of the data that is available related to Storm Eowyn of January 2025 across Ireland.