So who’s economy stands to gain the most from weather hedging?

The effects of weather risk on a countries economy depends on a number of factors including how severe the weather is in that region, how developed the nation is, how much the nation depends on weather sensitive industries such as agriculture and how much they hedge or mitigate those risks.

Weatherbill have released a really interesting study which looks at how weather sensitive 68 countries around the world are and how the adoption of weather hedging techniques could help their economies.

Most interesting is the massive effect that they say weather hedging could have on the global economy if it is broadly adopted. The countries who have the most to gain are listed below in this table from the report showing the top 20 countries by growth from weather hedging as a percentage of GDP:

As you can see, some countries stand to gain massively from a full adoption of weather risk management practices.

In the report it details who is the most weather sensitive. Unsurprisingly it’s the developed countries of the world who are most exposed in financial terms. If you look at it in terms of sensitivity to weather risks then developing countries come higher up.

So developing countries stand to gain in terms of GDP in a big way while the developed nations should be hedging because they are so sensitive to the effects of the weather.

A link to the full report can be found in the Artemis Library here (titled: Global Weather Sensitivity: A Comparative Study).