index based insurance

The UK’s Met Office, the national weather forecaster and data provider, have launched a new service called Site Wind Index which will offer 30 years of climatology data detailing hourly wind speeds for customer defined sites and heights which is updated monthly and annually. The idea behind the service is to facilitate creation of insurance […]

The development of microinsurance products using satellite data to create index-based insurance products is a growing industry and one which is showing increasing promise as the pilot projects scale out to encompass thousands of policyholders. The application of satellite technologies to create indices against which insurance products can be triggered is changing the way farmers […]

It’s that time of year again when our good friends at Environmental Finance announce the winners of their annual awards for companies and deals within the sectors their magazine and website covers. Of particular interest this year is their selection for the Weather Risk Management Deal of the Year. The winner is a weather risk […]

Insurance brokers Marsh and Guy Carpenter have jointly announced a new initiative called Project Noah which will launch in mid-2012. Project Noah promises to be a UK flood risk reinsurance pool which will enable home insurance in flood-prone areas to be more widely available and fairly priced by ensuring that reinsurance capacity is available for […]

The Asian Development Bank has published a report today on the topic of climate change, adaptation and the expected surge in migration that the variations in our climate will likely cause. The report, titled Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific, highlights that 42 million people in the region were displaced by […]

Tea growers in Kenya could soon have access to a new way to protect themselves against loss of earnings caused by frost damaging their tea plantations according to this article in Business Daily Africa. The Kenya Tea Development Agency, which is a marketing agency for half a million small farmers, is looking to launch an […]

HDFC Ergo General Insurance in India have announced that they have made their first payments under their weather-index insurance programme due to heavy rainfall in the Dewas district of India. The index based weather microinsurance coverage was offered for this first time in 2011 to protect soybean farmers from heavy rainfall.

The companies behind the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative weather-index microinsurance pilot program, which is currently operating in Ethiopia but plans to expand, have announced that the first successful payout to policyholders has been successfully made. Over 1,800 farmers in seven villages experienced drought conditions that triggered a payout under the terms of their index-based insurance […]

Kenya is again suffering from a drought which is causing hardship and deaths among the millions of affected people in the region. The resulting food crisis is one of the worst seen and despite the global awareness of the plight of drought affected Africans the support they receive remains minimal. However the drought has shown […]

The parties behind the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative microinsurance scheme have committed to expanding the reach of their weather-index insurance products outside of the original pilot country Ethiopia. The initiative involves the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam America, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Swiss Re provide the […]