Audio slideshow on Index insurance

Index insurance for development and disaster management from IRI Video Pages on Vimeo.

This is our latest audio slideshow, which Jason and I produced in record time for the launch of the Climate and Society publication at the 2009 Global Humanitarian Forum. I’ve written it before, and I’ll write it again: audio slideshows are a fantastic, low budget way to add pop to your stories. And we’ve found they’re much more virulent than traditional web stories. At IRI, we use Vimeo to share our multimedia.

IRI at COP14 in Poznan

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s participation at this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP14) in Poznan, Poland centers around two side events that highlight the importance of climate risk management for adaptation. One is on index insurance, the other is on using climate information to help prevent humanitarian disasters

Read more on the IRI news page.

[Image from COP14/Poznan 2008 gallery]

Index Insurance: a tool against poverty

This week’s web story on the IRI site gives an update to our work on using index insurance to protect farmers against some of the climate risks they face.

Index insurance remains a promising new tool to help alleviate poverty by reducing the impacts of climate shocks in the developing world. It may even increase the poor’s resiliency to climate change. In October, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society co-hosted a workshop to discuss the technical challenges that currently preclude the use of index insurance on a large scale.

“During the workshop, we learned about some of the scientific innovations that could help overcome the hurdles to scaling up insurance programs,” says IRI’s Molly Hellmuth, one of the event’s organizers and editor of the Climate and Society Publication. “However, the innovations must be balanced with the reality on the ground: we need simple, understandable and trustworthy products if impoverished communities are to use index insurance successfully.”

More than 30 experts from fields as diverse as reinsurance, climate science, economics and food security participated in the two-day workshop, which was co-hosted by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Among them were representatives from the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Development Programme and Oxfam America.

Click to get a more detailed description of index insurance.

Read the rest of the story on the IRI features page.

[Image designed by Jason Rodriguez/IRI]

Index Insurance for Ethiopian Farmers

Our latest web story discusses the new collaboration between the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Oxfam America, a nongovernmental organization that works on poverty issues.

The organization has enlisted IRI’s expertise on index insurance to design contracts for poor farmers in a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands (larger map). The goal of the project is to improve farmers’ ability to manage drought risks and subsequently gain better access to credit. If all goes well, the two organizations and their local partners hope to export the success to other villages and potentially scale up the program to cover entire districts.

Read the full story by visiting the IRI web site.

Index insurance- can it help reduce poverty?

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Swiss Re are jointly hosting a high-level policy roundtable on the use of index insurance for poverty reduction at this year’s Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva. The roundtable, which takes place on June 24, will include leaders from fields as diverse as reinsurance, climate science, economics and food security, in an effort to gain insight on how index insurance can best serve today’s development needs.

What is index insurance? Click to expand.

Read the rest on the IRI features page

[Image credit: Dan Osgood]