Design and Implementation of Weather Index Insurance Products for Floriculture and Nursery: A Case Study of Zhongshan City in Guangdong

The traditional insurance compensation of floriculture and nursery is not objective and has a long cycle. To solve this problem, meteorological index insurance products for Zhongshan floriculture and nursery plants are developed and implemented to improve the disaster prevention, reduction, and post disaster recovery capabilities. Based on daily meteorological data collected at Zhongshan national meteorological station from 1961 to 2023 and 46 regional meteorological stations from 2011 to 2023 as well as the disaster data from 2011 to 2020 and the planting scale and variety information of floriculture and nursery, meteorological index insurance products covering heavy rainfall and wind disasters have been developed and implemented through the selection of disaster-causing factors, the calculation of insurance thresholds, the determination of premium rates, the classification of meteorological index levels and the hierarchical design of compensation structure. The results are as follows. (1) Premium rate of Zhongshan floriculture and nursery meteorological index insurance products are designed according to specific situations in individual towns. The premium rate is set to 8% for towns/streets with higher disaster risks and 6% for those with lower disaster risks, which effectively reduces the "basis difference risk" problem of agricultural insurance. (2) Through implementation/verification of the 2021-2023 meteorological index insurance products, the town-level compensation accurately reflects varying degrees of disaster in different towns and matches well with actual disaster loss and reflects the characteristics of "Major disaster large compensation, minor disaster small compensation." in insurance. The design method of meteorological index insurance products tailored specifically for floriculture and nursery has been explored, which can provide ideas for designing meteorological index insurance products for subjects whose losses cannot be measured by yield or harvest.