Space insurtech: a bird’s eye view of war damage in Ukraine

When Ukraine was invaded by Russia in February 2022 certain vessels and their crews were trapped in and around the country’s Black Sea ports.

Communications between the ships’ captains and owners were still possible, but what was not immediately clear was the risk the conflict posed to the crews and their ships.

“What the insurance industry wanted to understand was where the vessels were and what kind of condition they were in,” Sarah Bourke, chief executive and co-founder of satellite specialist insurtech Skytek told Intelligentinsurer.com.

“There were two reasons for that: one was looking at the vessels, but the more important thing was to try and get the crews out,” she added.

Skytek used its space technology and satellite imagery product Earth Observation to understand where the vessels were and what other vessels, such as Russian warships, were in the vicinity. When Bourke spoke to Intelligentinsurer.com in late March, the insurtech had just published a report from its Satellite Club that showed a very significant build-up of Russian warships near Odessa in real time. It was this immediacy of satellite maritime information that helped coordinate the response to rescue people from the pinned-down ships.

“You cannot fly drones, you cannot get into the country to see exactly what’s going on and this is what is so special about satellite technology. It gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the country at this time, and this is what we’re supporting the industry with,” she said.
Bourke added the firm was also able to support land extraction efforts—its technology was used to look at roads and see how much traffic is on a road or motorway and if/where there was any damage.

The insurtech was asked to examine Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, such as at Chernobyl, and to look at one of the other nuclear plants that had come under Russian bombardment. “Sometimes it’s good news, sometimes not so good, as in ‘Yes there was shelling but the reactors were not affected’. This is the type of work we’re doing,” Bourke said.

The condition of Ukraine’s Kherson airport before and after a Russian attack is another piece of infrastructure that Skytek has analysed and reported on.

“The report has very startling imagery. You see the airport before, then you see the bombing, then you see the aftermath,” she explained. Annotated images showed burning helicopters, trucks and damaged planes and buildings.

“Space technology can assist loss assessment going forward. You can see exactly what’s happened, what’s damaged and the scale of the damage. That’s what the insurance industry is trying to get a handle on at the moment. When a building or a steel works or a facility is damaged they’re trying to estimate the scale of the impact.”

Space insurtech

As Bourke explained, Skytek was born out of the space industry. It is this and Earth Observation technology that is aiding insurance intelligence gathering within Ukraine.

“Space technology is interesting because it has lots of different technology within it. It’s not just an image, there’s also satellite AIS tracking, which tracks vessels and aircraft around the world.

“You can look at the satellite area and find where a particular asset is, then you’re tasking Earth Observation imagery to get an image of where that vessel or aircraft is at a particular moment in time.”

Such tracking technology has helped enforce sanctions by identifying and locating superyachts that are owned, or allegedly owned, by Russians on the sanctions list. Bourke said this tech is capable of spotting other sanctions breaches. For example, if Iran or Venezuela are under sanctions, the technology can monitor ship-to-ship transfers where vessels meet and offload Iranian oil to another tanker, which is a breach of sanctions.

“There’s a range of satellites and capabilities in space technology that can be used to assist the insurance industry in Ukraine,” she said. For example, cloud cover won’t halt monitoring work because synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is part of the mix and it can pick up metal on the ground, she added.

Complement the modelling
In the insurance industry modelling is front and centre at the moment, Bourke said. People model an incident to get an idea of losses after a major event.

“Space tech offers a whole new way of supporting modelling because it’s an open secret within the insurance industry that modelling is often off by magnitudes.”

She said that modelling, combined with satellite imagery, supports the modelling companies and insurance industry to obtain a much more accurate picture of what is going on. For example, computers can be trained to understand what is a car, a container, a forest, or a building. With this technology and Earth Observation imagery it is possible to count the number of cars in a location or the number of containers in a port.

“There are so many things you can do to improve the accuracy of your reporting on loss but also to understand your risk aggregation around the world and where it’s building,” she said.

A number of years ago, it would have been prohibitively expensive to task satellite imagery tech with this, she added, but the quality and the number of satellites is improving all the time and the cost is going down.

“What would have cost maybe thousands before is now hundreds, and that is changing the landscape for the insurance industry and what they’re able to do.”

Space tech can help re/insurers monitor wildfires, floods, earthquake damage, and the whole gamut of climate change risk and loss. The flooding in eastern Australia in March 2022 and the impact of Hurricane Ida on the US state of Louisiana in August 2021 are just two examples where this tech has compared pre and post-event damage data.

“It’s not only looking at what we would call the big bang events, you can also see historical data, particularly for climate change, such as deforestation, and you can see famine. There are so many things you can observe over time.”

Bourke said there is “a huge repository of information” that allows insurers to go into the archives and look at things retrospectively.

“What has happened in Ukraine has highlighted to the insurance industry the benefits of satellite technology,” she said.

“We are hoping that it will engender a realisation that satellite imagery has a very important role to play, not only in claims and risk management, but as a whole new way of looking at insurance.”