Traditional disaster risk management often relies on satellite data, which might not fully reflect the realities faced by vulnerable communities. DESDR (Decision Engine for Socioeconomic Disaster Risk) transforms this approach by integrating firsthand information from those most affected, enhancing accuracy and insight into disaster risks.

Insurance can be exploitive and harmful unless designed by the people it is intended to serve. We have over a decade of experience with thousands of focus groups in dozens of countries making this work through scalable and affordable/ approaches. This approach leads to more transparent reliable and fair insurance. It increases demand and often leads to higher levels of accuracy then ever seen. This workflow illustrates the process.

This is a workflow example for a game to help farmers decide if there is any point in buying an offered insurance product, or if it is not right for them.

Often disaster decisionmaking decisions are very complex. Here is an illustration of how games can be helpful for example to help unpack issues

Here is an example of a workflow that could be used to look for items that would need follow up in an insurance product being offered by bidders.

We have mentored a series of SIPA Masters Level Capstone (Class Project) courses over the years, mostly with Panos Varangis. You can see all of these courses at this link.

This is a the SIPA CAPSTONE course report on how someone running an insurance project might work with an insurance provider to identify issues to follow up on.

This is the SIPA CAPSTONE course report exploring hybrid methods for combining satellite, yield measurement, and ground information for lower cost, lower error insurance products.

Adapted from a story written by Olga Rukovets for the State of the Planet news site. Sari Blakeley did not always dream of a career in science. In fact, when she was younger, her understanding of “science” always involved “people in lab coats pipetting liquids over a Bunsen burner.” Over time, her perspective on science […]

This SIPA CAPSTONE course report uses data from Ethiopia to calculate how to set up the correct size of fund to address basis risk as reported by farmers

In order to offer protective insurance to even greater numbers of smallholder farmers, in 2021 ACToday began testing mobile crowdsourcing apps that tap into the experiences and memories of farmers themselves.

The United Nations’ twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties, or COP26, is taking place in Glasgow, Scotland from October 30 to November 12. The COP is the largest and most important international meeting on climate change. The countries involved come together to make a number of crucial decisions to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in order to […]

This story was originally written by Kristin French and published on the State of the Planet blog. Megafires, extreme weather, locust swarms, pandemics: These are just some of the many natural disasters that have devastated farmers in recent years, destroying livelihoods and leaving hunger in their wake. Between 2008 and 2018, disasters cost the agricultural […]

by Yohana Tesfamariam Tekeste and Souha Ouni Designing financial tools and processes that help farmers bounce back from droughts and other extreme weather events is a crucial part of their strategy to adapt to longer-term climate change. The Financial Instruments Sector Team (FISTeam) of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society has been an […]

The world’s 570 million smallholder farmers are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of current and future climate variability and climate change. They need support and science-based strategies to make their communities resilient to these impacts and enable them to have sustainable livelihoods no matter what the climate might bring. One adaptation strategy being […]

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 […]

This story was published as part of the Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project 2021 Report. Read the full report here. Since its launch in 2017, ACToday has invested in forecasts, monitoring tools and other information products to help government agencies, humanitarian organizations and farmers better plan for droughts and […]

Across the globe, food security continues to be a significant challenge, one that is estimated to increase with the compounding factors of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. The Next Generation Drought Index (NGDI) project addresses this challenge by leveraging satellite technology and drought modeling to provide humanitarian and development agencies access to the latest and most […]

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow (ACToday) Columbia World Project has helped create advanced and sustainable climate services around the world tailored for agricultural decision making. Countries are using these new services to manage many of the climate-related risks to their food systems. But even the best climate services by themselves cannot manage […]

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.

Until recently, predicting rainfall and temperature at the subseasonal timescale (i.e. between two weeks and three months) was considered impossible. That’s beginning to change, thanks to the efforts of IRI’s Andrew Robertson, the head of IRI’s climate group and co-chair of the steering group of the Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) Prediction Project.  In the Q&A […]

Often considered one of the most revolutionary technologies for climate research, remote sensing has the capacity to vastly improve the predictive strength of a wide variety of forecasting methodologies.  However, this is still a rapidly-growing field and continuing to evaluate and cross-reference remote sensing data against other data-gathering methods is necessary to improve accuracy, a […]

IRI's Juan Nicolás Hernandez-Aguilera discusses his research on sustainable coffee production. Originally from Colombia, his interest in the stark contrast between Colombia’s natural resource wealth and high levels of inequality, rural violence and deforestation has manifested in feeling a “responsibility to bring research toward action.”

As our climate continues to change, it becomes increasingly important to consider the effects this will have around the world, especially in developing countries where many small farmers already struggle.  For more than 10 years, researchers at IRI have been developing index insurance, which would provide a safety net for farmers who experience devastating climate […]

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 […]

A weather index insurance tool is graduating from research project to commercial product. Using multimedia and infographics, a new story puts the technical process in the context of its real-world impact. Find out how the International Research Institute for Climate and Society’s Financial Instruments Sector team pulled it off, and how the project could be […]

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 […]

The Financial Instruments Sector Team has launched a new publication on Medium, called Inside Index Insurance. The purpose of the publication is to provide a range of content types from team members – from quick dispatches from activities around the world to in-depth analysis of the technical components of financial instruments. “I’ve always wanted to know more about what […]

A range of IRI’s areas of expertise will be represented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Many of the presentations center on fundamental climate science, including analyses of the influence of climate variability and change on rainfall in the US, Iran, South America and the Sahel, as well as the […]

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 Bristol Powell & Helen Greatrex, Financial Instruments Sector Team   Satellite products could give index insurance projects the scaling power they seek, but challenges remain. A workshop held earlier this year addressed these challenges head on. Index insurance is innovative, but can it reach a critical mass? Until recently, many have doubted that index insurance could scale […]

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. […]

In November 2015, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, convened the El Niño 2015 Conference. The report from this conference is now available. In addition to recordings and summaries of the […]

In Tambacounda, Senegal, small-scale farmers rely on sufficient and steady rainfall at key times of the growing season. As climate change leads to increased irregularity and intensity of rainfall events, the adaptation strategies employed by farmers to cope with shocks do not always suffice. The fear of poor productivity in a year often prevents them from […]

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% […]

Texto por Sofía Martínez Video por Elisabeth Gawthrop, Sofía Martínez and Courtney St. John Respuestas de la investigación English version available here.  Durante las dos temporadas agrícolas del 2015, los productores de granos básicos de El Paraíso, Honduras se enfrentaron a una de las peores sequías en la historia, con pérdidas desde un 60 hasta […]

The IRI has seven scientists and staff presenting on a wide range of topics at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Meeting this year. Andrew Robertson and Alexis Berg will present advancements in our fundamental understanding of earth’s systems. Eunjin Han, Pietro Ceccato and Pradipta Parhi will discuss methods for using our climate knowledge for applications in agriculture, health and […]

Climate resilience: it’s the ability for communities to recover from the impacts of climate events. It’s the difference between weather being manageable…or a catastrophe. But for many parts of the world, where livelihoods depend so much on the climate, critical weather and climate information is unavailable or unusable. The International Research Institute for Climate and […]

Staff members from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) are participating in a number of high-level events during Climate Week NYC  this year. See the schedule below, and follow the links for more information. Launch of the Global Nutrition Report Tuesday, September 22 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm, Hearst Building, New York Climate change is complicating global efforts […]

A walk through the International Research Institute for Climate and Society is often punctuated by the sounds of French, Spanish and other languages drifting through the halls. Our international staff contributes to this, but usually it’s a sign that we are hosting visitors for training and collaborations. Despite the increasing online connectedness of our world, […]

Findings spur Nigerian government to look into solutions to cover 15 million farmers by 2017 LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (26 January 2015) — Nigerian government officials will convene in London this week to gather advice for scaling-up agricultural insurance policies for smallholder farmers, to bolster the up and coming agricultural powerhouse’s resilience to climate and market shocks. The meeting […]

Over the last year, the financial instruments sector team at IRI has been working in the Dominican Republic to design an index insurance product for the country’s dairy producers. This work has been part of the Climate Resiliency and Index Insurance Program (CRII), funded by the USAID office in the Dominican Republic. In a new video, we show how researchers […]

The Financial Instruments Sector team at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society works with farmers, development organizations and agencies, insurance companies and other research institutes to design insurance products that are tailored to local and regional climate risks and economic systems. With the help of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, we’ve produced this video […]

First Climate Week Panel To Focus On Building Innovative Index Insurance Markets in Developing Countries NEW YORK, September 18, 2014 — A panel of leaders and experts from the business, humanitarian and research communities will convene this week at the Climate Week NYC to discuss the growing relevance of index insurance as a tool to […]

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) is co-hosting several events during Climate Week NYC 2014. See the schedule of IRI events below, and follow the links for more information. If you are a member of the media and would like to attend any of the events, please write to media @ iri.columbia.edu. Sustaining Health Linking Environment, […]

By Sofía Martínez, Radost Stanimirova and Daniel Osgood Since January, the northwestern Dominican Republic has experienced one of the worst droughts in 15 years. Early work by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its partners on a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development has shown the potential for using […]

By Bristol Mann and Radost Stanimirova A group of climate scientists, economists and remote sensing experts from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are collaborating to help solve a longstanding issue in the development of agriculture insurance programs in Africa: how to generate enough quality environmental data […]

IRI and the University of Arizona address climate vulnerability in most at-risk areas of the world in new project The Caribbean, Asia’s Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa are three regions known to be extremely vulnerable to climate variability and change, particularly to droughts, extreme weather events and stresses on food production, water resources and coastal areas. A […]

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society and the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University are collaborating with the Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia Pacific at Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB – Bogor Agriculture University) in Indonesia to help farmers cope with droughts, fires and other climate impacts. The project, called “CU-IPB […]

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 […]

IRI has put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions for the US Agency for International Development about index insurance and how it is being used in development and adaptation projects around the world. Download the FAQ or click on the image. If you’re looking for even more resources on index insurance, head over to our Financial […]

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 […]

Subsistence Two acres of cracked earth. In northern Ethiopia, it can be a trap that keeps farmers tethered to it for generations. Or it can be a springboard to a better life for this and future generations. What impedes it from showing its springier qualities? You could argue the biggest pressure on the land comes […]

In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence and many other types of data. Decision makers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it […]

In our latest video 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: These products are becoming available to people for the first time at larges scales just this year. Given the difficulties of these [two] years, the farmers […]

Swiss Re, Oxfam America, The Rockefeller Foundation and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society announced a joint Commitment to Action at the Clinton Global Initiative 2009 meeting in New York, held from September 22 to 25. The collaboration is aimed at helping communities most vulnerable to climate variability and change. It will […]

Para Espanol: Seguro ‘parametrico’ y reduccion de la pobreza Pour Francais: Une assurance particuliere pour la gestion des risques climatiques 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. A type of insurance called index insurance […]

Weather Index Insurance Education: Classic Materials. These have been used in many projects over the decades and are here for you to enjoy.