Strengthening climate resilience requires farmers to select climate adaptation strategies like weather index insurance. Acknowledging that decision-making is not isolated, this study explores simultaneous peer imitation in climate adaptation choices consisting of index insurance, savings, and their interaction. We present results from a lab-in-the-field experiment that introduces innovative index insurance. Findings indicate significant and strong imitation attitudes. While the bigger peer surrounding seems relevant in the static perspective, the closer surrounding gains importance in the dynamic perspective. Additionally, credit, trust, and practical understanding stimulate adoption. Community-based extension interventions and credit-bundled products may increase index insurance diffusion and improve climate resilience.

In this article, we study the problem of optimal index insurance design under an expected utility maximization framework. For general utility functions, we formally prove the existence and uniqueness of optimal contract and develop an effective numerical procedure to derive the optimal solution. For exponential utility and quadratic utility functions, we obtain analytical expression of the optimal indemnity function. Our results show that the indemnity can be a highly nonlinear and even non-monotonic function of the index variable in order to align with the actual loss variable so as to achieve the best reduction in basis risk. Due to the generality of model setup, our proposed method is readily applicable to a variety of insurance applications including index-linked mortality securities, weather index agriculture insurance, and index-based catastrophe insurance. Our method is illustrated by numerical examples where weather index insurance is designed for protection against the adverse rice yield using temperature and precipitation as the underlying indices. Numerical results show that our optimal index insurance significantly outperforms linear-type index insurance contracts in terms of basis risk reduction.

This article focuses on innovation in weather insurance designed to fit the special circumstances of the poor in lower income countries where rural and agricultural financial markets are largely underdeveloped. Index insurance is an innovation that circumvents many of the fundamental problems that hamper the development of insurance for weather risks in lower income countries. With index insurance, payments are made based upon an objective and independent index that serves as a proxy for significant losses to crops, livestock, or other property. For example, the index can be based upon extreme rainfall measures that create either drought or flooding. Weather stations or even satellite imagery coupled with computer models can be used to create reliable “indexes” as the basis of payments. This article reviews this innovation by providing the background for its development and the motivation for using the innovation for the poor.

Crop index microinsurance is a novel product that has been piloted and implemented in many developing countries. We attempt to give an overview of crop index microinsurance, covering the major issues needed to design, price and implement a crop index microinurance programme. In some ways, providing insurance to the poor is fundamentally different to providing insurance to the middle-income or rich; in other ways, including in the actuarial fields of product design, pricing and risk financing, there are strong similarities. We offer a stylised discussion of these differences and similarities, with particular reference to issues of potential interest to actuaries, and propose an actuarial framework for crop index microinsurance. Case studies from Malawi and the Philippines provide examples for what does and what does not seem to work in crop index microinsurance, and motivation for further work needed.