The Caribbean: Innovation & Technology
Vulnerability to climate change can lead low-income communities deeper into poverty in the long run. Improving their ability to respond to, and cope with climate change-related shocks can increase social resilience and decrease vulnerability. Therefore, by establishing a mobile phone text message that alerts insurance policyholders to approaching extreme weather events, the project has sought to improve the risk management capacities of target communities.
Challenges related to this objective are:
- Close cooperation is required between the local insurers and national disaster management agencies as the information of an approaching extreme weather event is passed on by the disaster management agency to the insurer.
- Lack of trust in the national disaster management agencies by the insurers; they are perceived to not be very reliable.
- Insurers are wary of reputational risk if policy holders do not receive the extreme weather event information on time.
- Insurers do not acknowledge the additional value-add of such a feature as they opine that there is enough information related to extreme weather events broadcast by the national authorities.
