Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor PDF Download

Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor PDF full book. Access full book title Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor by Ceballos, Francisco. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.

Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor

Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor PDF Author: Ceballos, Francisco
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 4

Book Description
As climate variability gains prominence in the international policy agenda, public and private sectors alike are increasingly considering strategies to cope with its economic and social consequences. In turn, the general public—faced with a growing number of extreme weather events and natural hazards—is beginning to demand concrete action. One sector where climate variability and its associated risk have the most damaging impact is the rural economy, in particular smallholder farmers. This brief outlines some of the adverse effects that climate variability has on the rural economy and describes how different insurance mechanisms can contribute to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience to weather risks.

Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor

Weather risks and insurance opportunities for the rural poor PDF Author: Ceballos, Francisco
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 4

Book Description
As climate variability gains prominence in the international policy agenda, public and private sectors alike are increasingly considering strategies to cope with its economic and social consequences. In turn, the general public—faced with a growing number of extreme weather events and natural hazards—is beginning to demand concrete action. One sector where climate variability and its associated risk have the most damaging impact is the rural economy, in particular smallholder farmers. This brief outlines some of the adverse effects that climate variability has on the rural economy and describes how different insurance mechanisms can contribute to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience to weather risks.

Weather Index Insurance

Weather Index Insurance PDF Author: Lu Yu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Rural communities are particularly vulnerable to weather shocks and ecosystem decline. Traditionally, farmers have adapted to climate variability and extremes through various risk management strategies, either individually or cooperatively. However, climate change amplifies the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and exacerbates environmental degradation processes. Market-based risk transfer instruments are now being developed as complements to these conventional risk management strategies to shield rural households from increasing climate risks. At present, risk transfer solutions play a central role in the global climate and development agenda. International- and regional-level initiatives such as the InsuResilience Global Partnership support vulnerable developing countries to increase their financial protection coverage through climate risk finance and insurance, including through innovative micro-level schemes such as weather index insurance. Over the last decade, index-based weather insurance has been gaining attention in the climate resilience discourse. These schemes compensate insured individuals based on a pre-defined weather index instead of individual losses, as with traditional types of insurance. Therefore, this instrument has several advantages, including greater time- and cost-effectiveness and reduced moral hazard risk. Although weather-index insurance holds great promise, there are several challenges in designing and promoting it in developing countries. First, on the demand side, there is a lack of accessibility to affordable insurance, especially for the poorest rural populations exposed to climate hazards. Second, on the supply side, insurance providers are facing an elevated risk of paying larger claims due to the increasing frequency and severity of weather extremes, while reinsurance services are often missing. Third, the ecological effects of implementing weather index microinsurance initiatives receive little attention in research and policy. Yet, protecting the environment and building ecological resilience are critical policy dimensions of climate risk management in rural regions, where the poor disproportionately depend on ecosystem goods and services for a living, as they often lack alternative livelihood strategies. Looking into the key challenges to microinsurance initiatives and drawing upon findings of a review of literature on weather index insurance and field research, this Briefing Paper derives recommendations for development cooperation, governments and insurers for an enhanced action agenda on climate risk insurance. The discussion is focused on the specific case of weather index insurance for the rural poor at the micro level. We emphasise the importance of enhancing knowledge on the potential positive and negative ecological effects of weather insurance schemes, and the need to develop a diverse set of climate risk management strategies for the poor, including social protection mechanisms.

Can Financial Markets be Tapped to Help Poor People Cope with Weather Risks?

Can Financial Markets be Tapped to Help Poor People Cope with Weather Risks? PDF Author: Donald Larson
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Condiciones atmosfericas
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description


Can Financial Markets be Tapped to Help Poor People Cope with Weather Risks?

Can Financial Markets be Tapped to Help Poor People Cope with Weather Risks? PDF Author: Jerry Skees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. Most past research has focused on risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, specially on micro-level and household actions. These are risks that can been shared within a community or extended family. These strategies are effective for independent risks, but ineffective for covariate or systemic risks. The authors focus on private and public mechanisms for managing covariate risk for natural disasters. When many households within the same community face risks that create losses for all, traditional coping mechanisms are likely to fail. Such covariate risks are not uncommon in many developing countries, especially where farming remains a major source of income. The authors focus on risks related to weather events (such as excess rain, droughts, freezes, and high winds) that have a severe impact on rural incomes. Weather insurance could cover the covariate risk for a community of poor households through formal and informal risk-sharing arrangements among households that are purchasing these weather contracts. Given recent Mexican innovations targeted at helping the poor cope with catastrophe weather events, the authors use Mexico as a case study. In Mexico, poor households are exposed to systemic risks, such as droughts and floods, that affect the economic livelihood of their region. Catastrophic insurance is useful for small farmers, although commercially oriented small farmers may wish to obtain coverage for less catastrophic events. Weather insurance could meet this need. It pays out according to the frequency and intensity of specific weather events. Because weather insurance depends on the occurrences and objective measure of intensity of a specific event, it does not require individual farm inspection that can be very costly for small farm. The authors argue that a key issue of delivering insurance to small farmers is the existence of producer organizations. In Mexico, the farmer mutual insurance funds provide a good example. These funds provide insurance to their members by pulling together resources to pay for future indemnities and reinsures itself from major systemic risks that could hurt simultaneously all their members.

Assessing the Benefits of Long-Run Weather Forecasting for the Rural Poor

Assessing the Benefits of Long-Run Weather Forecasting for the Rural Poor PDF Author: Mark Richard Rosenzweig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural wages
Languages : en
Pages : 26

Book Description
The livelihoods of the majority of the world's poor depend on agriculture. They face substantial risk from fluctuations in weather conditions. Better risk, credit and savings markets can improve productivity and welfare in rural areas but entail high administrative costs. We consider a classic public good with benefits that theoretically exceed those of perfect insurance contracts -- improving the skill of long-run weather forecasts. We use an equilibrium model of agricultural production and labor migration, and a variety of Indian panel datasets to assess quantitatively the effects of improvements in seasonal forecasts of monsoon weather. We find that in areas where the forecast is accurate (has "skill") that investment, migration and rural wages respond to forecasts. We calculate that if such skill were pervasive across India, the total value of an accurate forecast for farmers and wage workers is in the tens of billions of rupees.

Weather Index Insurance for Smallholder Farmers in Africa

Weather Index Insurance for Smallholder Farmers in Africa PDF Author: Ephias Makaudze
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
ISBN: 191998545X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
ÿThe international conference on ?Weather index insurance in Africa: lessons learnt and goals for the future? was organised by the Department of Economics, University of the Western Cape, in collaboration with its international partners. The conference attracted over 40 participants drawn from academic and research institutions, insurance practitioners, reinsurers, government policy makers, bankers, agricultural producers, and representatives of non-governmental organisations. The presenters highlighted experiences, challenges and opportunities based on current pilot projects on weather index insurance in many parts of Africa.

Extreme Weather

Extreme Weather PDF Author: Philip John Sallis
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 1789236126
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
The term extreme weather normally conjures up thoughts of massive storms or heat waves or overtly cold temperatures. These are all examples of what we might consider as weather events that occur out of the ordinary or what is regarded as the normal pattern of calm, heat, cold, dry, or wet conditions for one season of the year or another. The point is that if we consider an oscillation of data points in a weather pattern and plot a mean through it, extreme weather can be observed as a perturbation in a distribution of climatic events over time. These events may be short-lived, such as a wind gust occurrence, or of longer duration, such as heavy rain leading to flooding. Importantly, once initiated, a perturbation event has an associated consequence, which usually requires human intervention to rectify the event’s consequences.

Reaching the Rural Poor

Reaching the Rural Poor PDF Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821354599
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Despite the fact that three quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas, the level of international development aid directed at rural areas has continued to decline over the last decade, particularly in terms of the agricultural sector. In 2001, lending for agricultural projects was the lowest in the World Bank's history. This publication presents the World Bank's new rural development strategy based upon a results oriented approach which stresses practice, implementation, monitoring and empowerment aspects. The strategy seeks to highlight rural development efforts, focusing on the needs of the rural poor, fostering a broad-based economic growth and addressing the impact of global developments on client countries.

Assessing the Benefits of Long-run Weather Forecasting for the Rural Poor

Assessing the Benefits of Long-run Weather Forecasting for the Rural Poor PDF Author: Mark Richard Rosenzweig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The livelihoods of the majority of the world's poor depend on agriculture. They face substantial risk from fluctuations in weather conditions. Better risk, credit and savings markets can improve productivity and welfare in rural areas but entail high administrative costs. We consider a classic public good with benefits that theoretically exceed those of perfect insurance contracts - improving the skill of long-run weather forecasts. We use an equilibrium model of agricultural production and labor migration, and a variety of Indian panel datasets to assess quantitatively the effects of improvements in seasonal forecasts of monsoon weather. We find that in areas where the forecast is accurate (has "skill") that investment, migration and rural wages respond to forecasts. We calculate that if such skill were pervasive across India, the total value of an accurate forecast for farmers and wage workers is in the tens of billions of rupees.

Weather Index Insurance and Shock Coping

Weather Index Insurance and Shock Coping PDF Author: Alain De Janvry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 37

Book Description
Weather risk and incomplete insurance markets are significant contributors to poverty for rural households in developing countries. Weather index insurance has emerged as a possible tool for overcoming these challenges. This paper provides evidence on the impact of weather index insurance from a pioneering, large-scale insurance program in Mexico. The focus of this analysis is on the ex-post effects of insurance payments. A regression discontinuity design provides find evidence that payments from weather index insurance allow farmers to cultivate a larger land area in the season following a weather shock. Households in municipalities receiving payment also appear to have larger per capita expenditures and income in the subsequent year, although there is suggestive evidence that some of this increase is offset by a decrease in remittances. While the cost of insurance appears to be high relative to the payouts, the benefits exceed the costs for a substantial range of outcomes.