L’assurance indicielle peut-elle relever le défi de la vulnérabilité face au changement climatique ?

Climate risk has long been a challenge to agricultural and livestock raising households in low-income countries, discouraging investment and productivity growth. Climate risk also presents a budget challenge to governments that provide social protection payments to their most disadvantaged citizens who have suffered from climate shocks. The steady advance of climate change only serves to deepen both of these challenges. Index insurance, which can be used to trigger payments to households or governments when climate shocks occur, would appear to have the potential of ameliorate the costs of both challenges. But as has become increasingly recognized, index insurance is imperfect and can fail to accurately measure shocks and release insurance payments when they are needed. A first step in addressing this imperfection in index insurance is define coherent quality standards that allow households and governments to evaluate whether the protection offered by any index insurance contract is worth its price. This paper summarizes emerging work on quality standards for both micro and sovereign index insurance. Having these quality standards in hand becomes a useful tool for designing better index insurance contracts and is a first step in helping index insurance to fulfill its potential to meet the challenge of climate change. Codes JEL : G22, O13, O16.