The Financial Instruments Division helps people overcome climate risk through financial tools like index insurance and index-based disaster risk management. Below is a series of videos demonstrating our past performance and showcasing the stories of our communities.
The Financial Instruments Division explains how farmer-driven index insurance can help manage climate risks and make farmers more resilient and productive.
Scientists and farmers in Honduras explain how interactive simulations help them co-develop an insurance product to mitigate drought risk. These experimental activities have supported farmers designing their own climate risk management tools.
There are many projects around the world that use climate or weather-based indexes to manage climate risk. These projects include insurance at the farmer or bank level, national disaster insurance, and disaster preparedness decision-making based on index triggers using weather information or forecasts. These projects have been in the exploratory phase for several years, and they’re transitioning into a more operational phase. And so, the big question is, how do you have climate services that provide the necessary support to move from initial pilots to something available at large scales in an operational way?
Dan Osgood is interviewed by Niger’s ORTN broadcasting service about a recent workshop on index insurance held in Niamey. TRANSLATION AND TRANSCRIPT by Souha Ouni
The National Council of the Environment and Sustainable Development (CNEDD) presents the validation of the weather-based insurance index for the agricultural sector. A strategy of agricultural politics that aims to support farmers in coping with climate change.
Management and local agricultural extension officers from Indramayu on the USAID – US Agency for International Development Indonesia-funded Index Insurance Research and Capacity Building project there. Taken in Sliyeg village, Indramayu district, it shows Pak Kusnomo, a leading Indramayu climate change technical team member, leading farmers through an adapted version of the IRI Financial Instruments team’s index insurance games. Farmers are using fake money to explore their options for using index insurance to increase their ability to make productive investments. The video shows an example of one farmer who chooses to take a loan and then decides which crops and inputs to invest in and whether or not to purchase insurance. Two farmers are seen high-fiving at the end when they are told by the moderator that in case of a bad season, they will still get an insurance payout to help repay the loans they took to purchase crops/inputs.
In the R4 project, farmers use rain gauges to gather daily rainfall. This is a Google Earth animation showing farmers’ actual rainfall measurements during the growing season of 2009 in Adi Ha, Ethiopia. The data collected from the rain gauges informs the development and use of index insurance products.
This photo film describes the Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation project in Tigray, northern Ethiopia.
In this interview, research economist Dan Osgood discusses index insurance and how it is helping some poor rural communities reduce hardships caused by drought in East Africa.
Climate has always presented a challenge to farmers, herders, fishermen, and others whose livelihoods are closely linked to their environment, particularly those in poor areas of the world. If certain challenges are overcome, a type of insurance called index insurance now offers significant opportunities as a climate-risk management tool in developing countries.
This video explains the integrated, multi-faceted approach of the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, with interviews from Senegalese farmers involved in the program. The World Food Programme and Oxfam America lead the initiative.
The Financial Instructors Division discusses what they’ve learned over more than a decade of developing index insurance for smallholder farmers around the world. Team members stress the importance of farmer-driven product design and the use of accurate climate data from rain gauges and satellites.
Climate risk instruments are designed to help farmers adapt to climate variability and change. These instruments are usually driven by data from satellites and weather stations, but these data sets can be improved over time using community-sourced observation data. Currently, such farmer data collection is limited to small-scale focus groups. However, increasing constraints on direct interaction and a lack of incentives for rural communities’ participation have presented challenges to crowdsourced verification. To address these issues, our team at Columbia University designed iKON, an app that uses game design and behavioral elements to gather accurate historical climate data by priming memory through pairwise comparisons of years. iKON compares players’ answers with satellites, weather stations, and neighbors’ responses.
