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Paleoclimate histories improve access and sustainability in index insurance programs
Authors:Andrew R Bell  Daniel E Osgood  Benjamin I Cook  Kevin J Anchukaitis  Geoffrey R McCarney  Arthur M Greene  Brendan M Buckley  Edward R Cook
Institution:1. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC 20006, USA;2. International Research Institute for Climate and Society, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA;3. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA;4. School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA;5. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA;6. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA
Abstract:Proxy-based climate reconstructions can extend instrumental records by hundreds of years, providing a wealth of climate information at high temporal resolution. To date, however, their usefulness for informing climate risk and variability in policy and social applications has been understudied. Here, we apply tree-ring based reconstructions of drought for the last 700 years in a climate index insurance framework to show that additional information from long climate reconstructions significantly improves our understanding of the underlying climate distributions and variability. We further show that this added information can be used to better characterize risk to insurance providers, in many cases providing meaningful reductions in long-term contract costs to farmers in stand-alone policies. The impact of uncertainty on insurance premiums can also be reduced when insurers diversify portfolios, and the availability of long-term climate information from tree rings across a broad geographic range provides an opportunity to characterize spatial correlation in climate risk across geographic regions. Our results are robust to the range of climate variability experienced over the last 400 years and in model simulations of the twenty-first century, even within the context of changing baselines due to low frequency variability and secular climate trends. These results demonstrate the utility of longer-term climate histories in index insurance applications. Furthermore, they make the case from a climate-variability perspective for the continued importance of such approaches to improving the instrumental climate record, even into a non-stationary climate future.
Keywords:Paleoclimate  Tree rings  Index insurance  Non-stationarity  Agriculture
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