Climate Change Impacts On Crop Insurance

In farming systems across Canada, effective risk management is necessary to deal with drought, flooding, and extreme weather, and to adapt to altered climate and weather conditions. Unfortunately, climate change risks and opportunities are not always well understood among researchers and policy makers in the Canadian agri-food sector. This book addresses that gap by providing a wide-ranging synopsis of what climate change means for Canadian agriculture, exploring different approaches to the topic, and presenting examples of current research. It covers all agricultural regions and a wide variety of commodity production and farming systems. This comprehensive survey synthesizes twenty years of research on climate change and Canadian agriculture.

This World Bank study brings together the forecast climate change impacts, costs vs. benefits of adaptation measures, and recommendations from the work conducted in Moldova.

The impacts of climate change on agricultural systems and rural economies are already evident throughout Europe and Central Asia. This study, Reducing the Vulnerability of Georgia’s Agricultural Systems to Climate Change, provides a menu of options for climate change adaptation in the agricultural and water resources sectors in Georgia.

The risks and opportunities of climate change for agriculture can be effectively dealt only by aligning policies, developing institutional capabilities, and investing in infrastructure and farms, as per the experiences of Albania, FYR Macedonia, Moldova, and Uzbekistan.

This study brings together the forecast climate change impacts, costs vs. benefits of adaptation measures, and recommendations from the work conducted in Uzbekistan under the World Bank s program, Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change in European and Central Asian Agricultural Systems

Too often, smallholder farmers suffer severe financial consequences from extreme weather events, pests, and disease; and climate change will increase the frequency at which natural hazards occur. This poses a threat to livelihoods not only ex post, by reducing agricultural output and inducing farmers to sell their assets, keep children out of school or borrow at high rates; but also ex ante, by discouraging farmers from investing in high-return practices and technologies (Elbers et al., 2007). Innovative solutions are needed to help marginalized farmers prepare for these natural hazards. One solution, building upon decades of agricultural research for development, can be found in the breeding of crop varieties that are more tolerant to weather shocks, pests and disease. The resulting improvements in seed technology offer promising pathways to improve farmers’ adaptive capacity, crowd in investments in agriculture, and thereby enhance agricultural productivity (Emerick et al., 2016). At the same time, stress tolerance is not a bullet-proof solution against all hazards. Farming is risky by nature, and improved stress-tolerant varieties will not shield farmers from more severe hazards, or from risks for which stress tolerance was not an explicit breeding objective. Drought-tolerant varieties are, for instance, not necessarily disease tolerant as well. Improving resilience in the face of climate change will require a more complete solution, in which farmers invest in stress-tolerant varieties to reduce their exposure to moderate, manageable risks, whilst accessing other types of solutions, including financial services, to protect their livelihoods from more severe and catastrophic production risks. This project note describes the findings from a research program in Kenya that aims to design, implement, and evaluate more complete risk management solutions; in particular, a solution that promotes stress-tolerant crops and varieties using an innovative picture-based crop insurance (PBI) product. The note first describes this intervention and the study designed to measure its impacts, followed by an overview of key findings at midline. This will include insights on the scalability of picture-based claims settlement, opportunities for more gender-responsive program design, and demand for the insurance product. We conclude by describing key challenges faced whilst implementing these solutions and providing an outlook for the future.

Governments in developing countries have been increasingly involved in the support of agricultural (crop and livestock) insurance programs in recent years. In their attempts to design and implement agricultural insurance, they have sought technical and financial assistance from the international community and particularly from the World Bank. One of the recurrent requests from governments regards international experience with agricultural insurance, not only in developed countries, where in some cases agricultural insurance has been offered for more than a century, but also in middleand low-income countries. Governments are particularly interested in the technical, operational, financial, and institutional aspects of public support to agricultural insurance. 'Government Support to Agricultural Insurance' informs public and private decision makers involved in agricultural insurance about recent developments, with a particular focus on middle- and low-income countries. It presents an updated picture of the spectrum of institutional frameworks and experiences with agricultural insurance, ranging from countries in which the public sector provides no support to those in which governments heavily subsidize agricultural insurance. This analysis is based on a survey conducted by the World Bank s agricultural insurance team in 2008 in 65 developed and developing countries. Drawing on the survey results, the book identifies some key roles governments can play to support the development of sustainable, affordable, and cost-effective agricultural insurance programs.