The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow Columbia World Project (ACToday) has been working with its Ethiopian partners to create new climate tools for decision makers working in agriculture and food security. These investments are now directly enabling the World Food Programme (WFP) to reach its 2022 target of providing a million smallholder farmers in Ethiopia with affordable insurance against droughts and other climate risks.
Despite an overabundance of food in some parts of the world, about 815 million people suffered from chronic undernourishment in 2016. Poor nutrition leads to nearly half of deaths in children under the age of five. Many of those who are hungry are farmers and their families. Our food systems clearly aren’t working as well […]
By Dan Osgood, Lead Scientist, IRI Financial Instruments Sector Team Small farms are vulnerable to climate risk, but most smallholder farmers around the world don’t have access to insurance and other financial tools to manage fluctuations in climate. Over the past decade we’ve put a great deal of effort into a new kind of insurance–index insurance–that […]
In mid September, IRI staff helped launch an innovative new data platform in Lusaka, Zambia that combines satellite rainfall estimates with the country’s existing network of rain gauges. The platform, developed with the Zambia Meteorological Department and through funding from NASA, is the latest to come out of IRI’s Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative […]
By Daniel Osgood More than 25,000 insured farming families in Ethiopia have received payments for crop loss and damages after a year of devastating drought caused in large part by the 2015 El Niño. The farmers purchased the insurance through the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative [latest report], run by the World Food Program and Oxfam America. […]
A new paper shows that the average number of tornadoes per outbreak has grown by more than 40% over the last half century. The likelihood of extreme outbreaks – those with many tornadoes – is also greater. Most death and destruction inflicted by tornadoes in North America occurs during outbreaks—large-scale weather events that can last one to […]
Text by Sofía Martínez Video by Elisabeth Gawthrop, Sofía Martínez and Courtney St. John Answers from insurance research La version en español esta disponible aquí. During the first of the two growing seasons of 2015, grain farmers in El Paraíso, Honduras faced one of the worst droughts in history, with losses ranging from 60 to 100% […]
Index insurance can lower the cost of insurance, allowing smallholder farmers to buy insurance that can help them withstand the impacts of bad years and risk making productive investments in good years. A key component of index insurance is historical data – often temperature or rainfall data – to use as a basis for creating an index that determines when insurance payouts […]
Oxfam America and The Rockefeller Foundation announced a weather index insurance payout of unprecedented scale directly to poor farmers. Thanks to a groundbreaking new program that relies on advanced satellite technology, more than 12,200 farmers in 45 villages in Northern Ethiopia will benefit from drought protection. As a result of this year’s drought conditions each […]
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