This UNFCCC Africa Climate Week virtual side event focused on evidence-based research from Mozambique and Tanzania that presents a new way of thinking about resilience and climate risk mitigation programming.

Overview

In emerging economies, climate disasters like droughts or floods make people poor. The potential for disasters also keeps people poor by adding a level of risk and uncertainty risk that prohibits the adoption of more productive innovations. Reducing the risk of climate disasters can create opportunities for families to take up new climate- adaptive technologies like drought-tolerant seeds. Effectively mitigating climate risks results in increases in food and income that keep people from falling into poverty and create an enabling environment to help families not just survive, but thrive - that’s Resilience+.

This panel will clearly explain the policy implications of Resilience+ using evidence from field research conducted in Tanzania and Mozambique. This intervention bundled drought-tolerant maize with the financial innovation, index insurance. This combination of complementary climate risk reducing interventions, one agronomic, and one financial, not only smoothed the negative effects on smallholder farmers during a drought, but also spurred substantial productivity gains during post-shock recovery.

The smart application of appropriate financial innovations, such as index insurance, can help shrink the resilience gap and position a family for higher income growth when those tools provide the security to invest in a new businesses or in more productive, or climate-adaptive agricultural technologies.

Bringing in experts from University of California Davis, CIMMYT Kenya, and Hollard Insurance Mozambique, and Suba Seed Company Tanzania, this panel session laid out the theory of Resilience+ and provided policy-relevant evidence and private sector perspectives to inform climate risk programming across Africa.

Panelists:

• Michael Carter, Director of the MRR Innovation Lab, and Professor of Agricultural Economics, UC Davis
• Paswel Marenya, Socioeconomist, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), Kenya
• Sarah Muya, Assistant to the Managing Director, Suba Agro Trading & Eng Co, Tanzania
• Israel Muchena, Director - Agriculture Insurance Division at Hollard, Moçambique

Session Recording: