When disasters strike, effective risk financing can help communities and economies to recover quicker and with reduced enduring impacts. However, financing programs must meet the needs of the vulnerable people whom they promise to serve. In my research, I am interested in the role of insurance in managing flood risks to agriculture and how satellite technologies can help to improve insurance processes and recovery outcomes for climate vulnerable populations.
My motivation for this stems from my time working in the global reinsurance industry, where I worked with public sector clients to develop macro (re)insurance programs intended to build resilience through novel approaches to risk finance. This included working with the Government of Morocco to establish the first index-based reinsurance contract in the country. In my current work, I focus on evaluating different approaches to index-based insurance, with the aim to encourage rigorous, transparent and validated index designs in emerging real-world insurance programs.
Research Areas
- Climate risk finance
- Index-based insurance
- Forecast-based financing
- Public insurance programs
- Flood hazards, monitoring and mapping
- Resilience and adaptation in agricultural settings
- Disaster economics