Paper short abstract:

Weather based index insurance has recently emerged as an important tool that can allow smallholders to manage climate risk and increase productivity. This talk discusses the highly interdisciplinary nature of index insurance and climate risk perception, from individual farmers to program and policy.

Paper long abstract:

Weather based index insurance (WBII) has recently emerged as an important tool that can allow smallholder farmers to manage climate risk and increase productivity. Rather than directly insuring losses, payouts are triggered when an index - such as wind speed or an amount of rain during a certain window of time - falls above or below a pre-specified threshold.

WBII is inherently interdisciplinary at every scale. For individual farmers, the perception of climate risk and the decision to purchase insurance is embedded in a complex and shifting context of personality, financial liquidity, social equity, trust, power, institutions, culture and history. Failing to take these multiple drivers into account can often lead to unintended consequences or poor links with developmental outcomes. Equally at a programme level, WBII programmes that have scaled have often included meaningful input from economists, remote sensing experts, meteorologists, social scientists, index designers, local insurers, international reinsurers, NGOs and donors. We are still learning to speak the same language and these are often several different (and occasionally contradictory) visions of success within a single project.

In this paper, we present examples to show the benefits and challenges of including interdisciplinary and inter-scale dialogue within WBII, including

-How participatory insurance design using historical weather data and climate perceptions allowed African smallholders a voice in an international design process, significantly increasing sales and enabling insurance to reach over 25,000 farmers.

-How qualitative sociological research on gender and insurance in Ghana is unlocking new opportunities for insurance and development.