Looking beyond loss and damage: Reframing insurance to promote adaptation and resilience

In much of the developing world, climate change is expected to increase the risk from extreme weather events, and scaling insurance is vital to enhance agricultural risk management and adaptation among the rural poor. Insurance program impacts however too often claim impacts based on the number of farmers insured, or total payouts made; instead of documenting livelihood impacts, and/or addressing key challenges that hamper impacts on resilience. A mix of stakeholder expertise is required to design, evaluate and scale insurance programs that have the potential to enhance resilience among the rural poor. We highlight the contribution that agricultural research-for-development (AR4D) can play to help strengthening scaling efforts and evaluating the impacts of insurance on resilience

Scaling up agricultural adaptation through insurance: Bringing together insurance, big data and agricultural innovation

Our belief that index insurance holds significant potential to reduce climate risk for small-holder farmers through its protection and promotion roles, significantly improving the welfare of farm households, is why we are bringing together experts from across the insurance, agriculture and climate change sectors to find the best ways to scale-up index insurance schemes as a key climate change adaptation action. This background paper includes a short introduction to index-based agricultural insurance. The bulk of the paper (Section 3), however, focuses on the challenges and opportunities to scaling up agricultural adaptation through insurance. Based on a review of secondary literature, interviews with key informants and the authors’ experience, we highlight a number of issues that warrant concerted multi-stakeholder attention and action in order to realize the potential of index insurance as a key component of climate change adaptation

Building resilience through climate risk insurance: Insights from agricultural research for development

Scaling insurance to transfer climate risk from the rural poor to financial markets is vital to enhance agricultural risk management in developing countries, but insurance programs need to address several challenges in order to improve resilience at scale. A mix of stakeholder expertise is required to design, evaluate and scale insurance programs with the potential to enhance resilience among the rural poor. We highlight the contribution that agricultural research for development can play by providing data, methods, impact evaluations and other research products that can help strengthen and verify the impacts of insurance on resilience at scale. These outputs are made available to the insurance industry as public goods in order to overcome challenges around, among others, data availability, targeting and design of insurance, distribution channels and use of technology, bundling with risk-reducing technologies and practices, enabling environments and smart subsidies, and capturing the full value chain

Scaling climate services to enable effective adaptation action

Adaptation to anthropogenic climate change is the biggest challenge that humankind faces. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a synthesis of the state of the science, impacts, and policy, with a focus on long-term climate trends. However, the worst impacts of climate change are likely to come from its exacerbation of weather and climate variability. For example, higher temperatures in a particular region could lead to harsher droughts and more deadly heat waves. These are also the kinds of hazards that are regularly monitored and forecast by governments and institutions at the national, regional, and international scale. This paper argues that climate services are a critical component of adaptation. Communities that benefit from climate services will be better adapted to long-term climate change as well as the weather events and the year to-year variability it could make worse. Climate services involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate knowledge and information in relevant decision-making, policy and planninga. They involve far more than climate data, encompassing an understanding of the needs of decision makers and delivering useful information in ways it can be applied for better results. A well-functioning climate service can help decision-makers understand, anticipate, and manage climate-related risks across the range of relevant time scales, from days to decades, much in the way a national meteorological service (NMS) does for weather. Yet, in most of the world, climate services are not sufficiently developed, nor are they properly aligned with the needs of decision-makers in the sectors and systems that are most at risk. The urgency of the climate challenge calls for a critical examination of the current state of climate services relative to the needs of decision-makers; it also requires aggressive action to address long-standing obstacles to meeting those needs. While several decades of research, investment, and implementation provide a strong foundation for climate services, more deliberate action is needed to position climate services as essential to adaptation