The Problem
As climate change increases the toll on local communities, climate insurance is one mechanism to support adaptation efforts. By providing compensation, insurance can help families and businesses to recover more easily after an extreme event hits a community. However, and despite the efforts dedicated by climate governments and donors, climate insurance has not delivered as promised.
Suyana was created to tackle a problem that affects millions of farmers around the world. Every year adverse climatic events have long-lasting effects on the quality in the livelihoods of the vulnerable.
Current methods for crafting climate insurance policies suffer from three related problems.
Climate change makes prediction of future extreme events significantly more difficult.
Local damage functions are poorly estimated. There is still much to be learned and understood about the local effects of these events, particularly in environments where data on historical observed losses is scarce.
Conventional approaches to ex-post damage assessment to be either too expensive to be scalable, or too imprecise to satisfy consumer demands. Conventional damage characterization methods, like in person site assessments, are costly and slow, reducing the quality of user experience. Parametric solution offers the promise of improved user experiences, but suffer from problems of accuracy in the assessment, potentially leaving many consumers unsatisfied.
