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The topic of climate change has in many ways become as polarizing as politics and religion. It’s usually a good idea to avoid bringing it up at family gatherings, at work and especially on first dates.  The topic is almost certain to set off a “heated” ideological debate about whether or not humans are driving planetary warming.

 

However, one thing that hopefully everyone can agree on is that no matter what’s causing climate change, its impact is indeed very real. To help quantify things, NASA has provided a few facts on the vital signs of the planet. One aspect that is often overlooked is that the impact of a warming climate is devastating to farmers.  This fact can have major ramifications for the food supply around the world, as weather is the main determinant of yield and harvest. Therefore, any progress in helping to financially protect against future weather-related calamities will contribute directly to the betterment of mankind. 

 

A company that’s dedicated exclusively to weather risk management is the French startup, Meteo Protect. They monitor weather and analyze its history to help businesses ranging from agriculture to the financial sector adjust their insurance models based on weather events. For example, the company helps wind energy utilities cover the risk of low average wind speed. They also protect food processing companies that buy commodities against the impact of weather on the growing of food. Succinctly, Meteo Protect provides companies around the globe customized insurance solutions to help offset the punitive financial impact of climate change.

 

Meteo Protect is a part of SAP Startup Focus - a program designed to help startups with successful proof-of-concept solutions in the Big Data, predictive, and real-time analytics space. They were recently a part of Sapphire Now 2016 in Orlando, Florida, where the CEO of Meteo Protect, Gabriel Gross, stated just how costly changing weather is:

 

“The weather can cost two trillion dollars or 3.5% of world GDP. But small farmers can lose up to half of their revenue if the winter is too cold or too mild.”

 

As it measures and manages weather variability around the world, Meteo Protect analyzes enormous weather databases - both historically and in real-time - so the best existing technology is critical for company success. Serendipitously, Co-Innovation SAP Startup Focus looks for innovation that exists outside of SAP, and consists of startups like Meteo Protect. The idea is to build solutions on SAP technology within an innovation ecosystem that bridges the more traditional enterprise world with the cutting edge technology that resides in the startup community.

 

Mr. Gross said that with SAP HANA, Meteo Protect found a system that is reliable and extremely fast, and helps continually analyze the individualized effects of climate change for each of their clients. Today Meteo Protect is running 100% on SAP HANA and tracking multiple data streams in real-time.

Gross also believes that without SAP HANA, the company would not be able to produce insurance policies that are specifically targeted to each client’s needs in the most cost-effective way. Additionally, he stated that SAP HANA has saved the company time and money while “simplifying all of their IT infrastructure tremendously.”

 

He further added, “SAP HANA is really the core of our infrastructure.  We have cut processing time dramatically, and totally changed interaction times with our clients. To be able to inject all known history of weather into the system rapidly, and in a very secure way, has been a game changer for us.”

 

Clearly, the collaboration with SAP enables Meteo Protect to better calculate the “weather risk” facing any business in the world, and protect critical resources like food and energy supply from adverse weather conditions.

 

With so much at stake today, regardless of where one may stand on the root cause of climate change, finding innovation that helps offer all life on earth a more secure future is one area everyone needs to agree on.

Learn more about Meteo Protect #SAPTalks podcast as well as on their SAP Customer Journey