The Financial Instruments Division (FI) helps people overcome climate risk through financial tools like index insurance and index-based disaster risk management. Through our partners, collaborators, and educational activities, we engage the players necessary to represent a wide array of expertise and perspectives and build community-driven solutions.
The Financial Instruments Division (FI), a current affiliate and a former section of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), has broken boundaries in bringing insurance to populations believed to be unreachable due to poverty or technical issues, leading to extremely popular products with demonstrated impacts and overwhelming demand, often scaling by an order of magnitude each year.
The division has worked in over a dozen countries on hundreds of index contracts with millions of policies purchased by farmers. For many years, partnerships have explored the potential for using index insurance in developing countries to assist emerging markets, increase the productivity of smallholder farmers, and reduce the threats from climate risk. Through projects on index insurance for climate adaptation and poverty reduction, many of the key constraints for index insurance to be able to address poverty at large scales meaningfully have been unlocked, overcoming what has previously been considered impossible hurdles in technology, information, poverty levels, and farmer involvement using a strong science base, cooperative design and validation, and strategic integration into adaptation and development packages.
The Financial Instruments Division also supports disaster risk management strategies through index-based tools. Building upon our work on floods and hurricanes, national governments and non-governmental organizations now develop climate/forecast/weather thresholds for action across several countries.
Research contributions include work on the use of probabilistic information in decision-making, the valuation of environmental features, the use of remote sensing proxies in quantifying environmental amenities and environmental risk, the value of information in negotiation and markets, how uncertainty, risk, and information impacts negotiations between players, and work specific to index insurance, climate information, adaptation, and economic development.
The Financial Instruments Sector Division explains how farmer-driven index insurance can help manage climate risks and make farmers more resilient and productive.
Dr. Daniel Osgood leads the Financial Instruments Sector Team at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP), linking climate information to financial tools to improve livelihoods in developing countries. His team supports most index insurance projects that have gone to scale, with hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers purchasing index insurance contracts they have helped design through farmer-driven, science-based processes, leading to significant development impacts. His research topics include uncertainty in decision-making, environmental valuation, remote sensing proxies, information, and work specific to index insurance and economic development. He has been involved in global policy processes such as the UNFCCC, with projects he works on highlighted by Ban Ki-moon in the opening speech at the 2015 Paris COP. He has had press coverage in venues spanning Voice of America, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, Nature, New York Times, and Reuters.
Dante Salazar Ballesteros is a development professional committed to more broadly building and implementing evidence on climate adaptation, food security, and social vulnerability. His work focuses on translating technical knowledge into public action by providing tools to guide decision-making processes at different program and policy design stages. He has held positions in the public and non-profit sectors, mostly supporting fieldwork operations, program evaluation, and research projects. He is interested in building innovative, more secure paths to development while exploring the intersection of climate services, social inclusion, and food systems.
Sarah (Sari) Lucille Blakeley is an Associate Research Scientist at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP). Formerly, she was part of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. Her research focuses on understanding how global climate change impacts human and natural systems across multiple spatiotemporal scales, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, this research focuses on food security, gendered impacts of climate shocks, financial risk management to natural disasters, climate variability, and climate change. Her research heavily focuses on application- finding solutions to real-world problems. Blakeley’s research examines how vulnerable populations make decisions under climate shocks and climate variability. She uses innovative technologies, spatial statistics, climate science, demography, and economic methods to analyze questions about food security, heat stress, and climate impacts. Blakeley received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Geography, her MA from Columbia University in Climate and Society, and her BS in Economics, Interdisciplinary Studies, and French from Michigan State University.
Lisette Braman serves as Program Manager on the Financial Instruments Sector Team, a group managing insurance research, implementation, and education projects with a wide range of partners, supported by dozens of individual grants for projects that serve several hundred thousand farmers.
Before joining this team, Lisette served as Climate Risk Advisor to the American Red Cross, International Services Department. There, she provided technical support to increase awareness of climate variability and change in international disaster risk reduction programs. Lisette’s work with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement began in 2008 at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, where she provided technical support to multi-country programs, including the Preparedness for Climate Change Program and Partners for Resilience. While working for the Climate Centre, Lisette was also based at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), where she helped facilitate the Partnership to Save Lives with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). This work involved liaising with climate scientists to provide tools and services that supported forecast-based decision-making, working as part of the Help Desk Team to provide disaster managers with rapid responses to climate-related questions, and coordinating an internship program, bringing graduate students with climate expertise to Red Cross/Red Crescent offices around the world. Lisette also documented the use of climate information by the Red Cross in West Africa for improved disaster preparedness and response.
Through the master’s program in Climate and Society at Columbia University, she gained interdisciplinary knowledge of climate variability and change. Before entering the field of Climate Risk Management, Lisette worked with non-profit organizations, including the Environmental Leadership Program and the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group. Lisette earned her undergraduate degree in Environment, Economics, and Politics at Scripps College.
Nitin Magima is part of the Financial Instruments Sector Team at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP). In his role, he collaborates with climate scientists to devise strategies that assist national governments in mitigating climate risks. This involves partnerships with global entities like the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank, NASA SERVIR, Global Center on Adaptation, and One Acre Fund.
Previously, Nitin developed and executed research and training for climate risk reduction for Columbia University’s first World Project, Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow. ACToday provided 110 trainings in six countries, reaching over 2,150 participants, which helped national governments to develop climate forecasts and mapping tools for more effective national food security planning and policy.
Holding a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, Nitin is proficient in applying statistical tools and data analytics to address diverse policy and climate-related challenges. He is also a FSA Credential Holder.
Max Mauerman is a Senior Staff Associate III at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) and a PhD candidate at the University of Reading Department of Agriculture, Policy and Development. His roles at NCDP include the development of decision-support tools for climate risk management and researching economic decision-making under climate uncertainty. Before joining NCDP, Max worked for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), where he co-managed a large-scale evaluation of a rangeland conservation program in Namibia. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Food Programme and Tetra Tech on research topics related to climate resilience and conservation agriculture.
