Linking remote sensing and climate data for an agriculture index insurance program in Ethiopia

Christopher Neigh, NASA GSFC, christopher.s.neigh@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Molly Brown, UMD, mbrown52@umd.edu (Presenter)
Dan Osgood, Columbia, deo@iri.columbia.edu
Jessica McCarty, Michigan Tech, jmccarty@mtu.edu
Bristol Mann, Columbia, bfmann@iri.columbia.edu
Gregory Husak, UCSB, husak@geog.ucsb.edu
Martha Anderson, USDA, martha.anderson@ars.usda.gov
Christopher Hain, NOAA/UMD, chris.hain@noaa.gov
Helen Greatrex, Columbia, greatrex@iri.columbia.edu

One of the most immediate and obvious impacts of climate change is on the weather-sensitive agriculture sector. Both local and global impacts on production of food will have a negative effect on the ability of humanity to meet the needs of its growing population. Many factors are affecting agriculture – trends in rainfall and temperature, changes in ecological resilience and the increasing need for ecosystem services such as fresh water provision. The most vulnerable and food insecure regions of the world such as the Horn of East Africa need financial tools to reduce the risk of food production shortages while enabling productivity increases to meet the needs of a growing population. This interdisciplinary project brings together an index insurance program with climate assessment and remote sensing expertise to develop a moisture-based, scalable, sensor-independent remote sensing product that could be used in agriculture insurance programs around the world. We have focused our efforts in Ethiopia, where there are active index insurance pilots that can test the effectiveness of our remote sensing-based approach for use in the insurance industry. Our research seeks to provide a multi-resolution, multi-sensor source of weather and climate information that will enable the scaling up of an agriculture insurance program that provides basic weather-risk financial support. Index insurance provides an indemnity payout that depends on the exceedance of a threshold variable such as water level (for floods) or consecutive days without rain (for droughts). Many insurance companies and non-profit development organizations are working to develop index insurance for smallholder farmers that face food security risk. Index insurance can facilitate the availability of credit enabling the wide spread increases in the use of improved seeds and the ability to endure the one in five year drought that would otherwise disrupt smallholder farmer livelihoods.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  General Contributions   (Tue 4:35 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Brown, Molly: Linking Remote Sensing Data and Energy Balance Models for a Scalable Agriculture Insurance System for sub-Saharan Africa ...details

Poster Location ID: 191