Evaluating climate change in Greece through the insurance compensations of the rural production damages

Climate change is a global problem and one of the major environmental concerns of today. It is also related to economic losses in many ways. It is evident that the worldwide research focuses on measuring the economic consequences of climate change. The present paper introduces a reverse point of view. Specifically, it attempts to estimate the environmental change in Greece through the economic losses caused by the rural production damages and the resulting insurance compensations. For this purpose, the data available by the Greek Agricultural Insurance Organization (GAIO) has been used, considering that if we assume that the climate has begun to change, these changes surely will affect the functioning of GAIO, which is the main institution for the insurance of the rural production in the country. For the statistical analysis, fit-for-use non-parametric tests were used and the main conclusion is that there was an increasing shift in the frequency of appearance of extreme phenomena that is related with atmospheric precipitation and more precisely with the rain and the hail, as well as an increase of the recorded windstorms in most regions.