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]

Predicting and preventing climate-driven epidemics

Exciting news for the International Research Institute for Climate and Society:

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Internet search company, has awarded the IRI $900,000 to work with its partners to improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate information in East Africa, and to build stronger connections between weather, climate and health specialists there so they can better predict and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The award is part of Google.org’s Predict and Prevent program, which funds projects and technologies that help map “hot spots” of global emerging infectious diseases and develop improved early-warning systems that predict potential disease outbreaks.

Climate plays a critical role in determining the distribution of many of Africa’s epidemic diseases, such as malaria and meningitis. Their transmission is dependent on prevailing environmental conditions such as rainfall and temperature. Year-to-year variations in the amount of rainfall and temperature can therefore change the pattern and timing of epidemics. This makes it difficult for poor countries to plan their public health strategies.

But the link between climate and some diseases means that seasonal forecasts, satellite measurements and other data can be useful in making decisions about how much resources to allocate for an upcoming epidemic season, and when and where to allocate them.

Read more about the Google.org grant.

Be sure to dowload a cool new Google Earth layer that shows the locations of each grant project.

Disasters: Shifting from Response to Prevention

I posted a web story on the IRI home page about the wonderful work of a few of our interns completed during assignments in West Africa and Central America…

Torrential rains lashed West and Central African countries this rainy season, setting off flooding and causing considerable damage. On the evening of June 26th alone, nearly 200 millimeters of rain fell on the villages of Malem Hoddar and Malem Thierigne in eastern Senegal. The ensuing flash floods killed at least one person, displaced dozens of families and destroyed hundreds of homes and livestock. As usual, the regional Red Cross office in Dakar mobilized its vast network of donors and volunteers to respond to this and other events. But this season, the organization also did something fundamentally different in its operations.

“It’s a revolution,” says Pablo Suarez, Associate Program Director at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center. “Not only was this the first time a particular zone in West Africa used a particular forecast, it was the first time in the history of the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement that science-based information about something likely to happen was used to ask for aid,” he says.

A key player in this transformation was an IRI intern and Climate and Society masters student named Arame Tall. In early June, Tall went to work with the Disaster Management Unit of the Red Cross office for West and Central Africa (IFRC-WCAZ), based in Dakar, to find ways to incorporate forecasts and other climate information into Red Cross decision making.

Halfway across the globe, Tall’s classmates, Sarah Abdelrahim and Lisette Braman, were on a similar mission in Panama, working with forecasters at the Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean (CATHALAC).

The internships were the latest example of the ongoing, expanding partnership between the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the IRI.

Complete story on the IRI features page.

Photo: Courtesy IFRC

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.

Making the grade

Governments, development organizations and other entities spend billions each year on programs aimed at improving the lives of poor people in developing countries. But have these interventions actually made a difference? That’s difficult to answer, says one IRI researcher, because many programs haven’t been rigorously evaluated. She hopes to incorporate impact evaluations into some of IRI’s climate-risk management projects.

Read the rest on the IRI features page

[Image credit: Francesco Fiondella]

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]

Summer Institute 2008 Kicks Off

Fourteen professionals from nine countries are hard at work learning ways to use climate knowledge to make better decisions for health-care planning and control of climate sensitive diseases such as malaria and meningitis. They are participants of the Summer Institute 2008 on Climate Information for Public Health organized by the IRI, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

[Image credit: Daniel Yeow]

Read the rest on the IRI features page.

Agricultural water management and climate risk

Feasible investments in agricultural water management are likely to bring the greatest livelihood benefit to the rural poor of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia if they are part of a comprehensive approach to managing climate risk, according to a new report from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

“Despite the known impacts of current climate risk and growing concern about future climate change, climate risk management remains conspicuously absent from many analyses and regional development strategies,” write Casey Brown and James Hansen, the authors of the report, called Agricultural Water Management and Climate Risk (download it here). The report was commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and will help guide the foundation’s investment strategy in agricultural and water development in the face of climate variability.

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