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Early assessment of seasonal forage availability for mitigating the impact of drought on East African pastoralists

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Title Early assessment of seasonal forage availability for mitigating the impact of drought on East African pastoralists
 
Creator Vrieling, Anton
 
Contributor Meroni, Michele
Mude, Andrew
Chantarat, Sommarat
Ummenhofer, Caroline C.
de Bie, C.A.J.M. (Kees)
 
Subject ndvi time series
index insurance
 
Description Pastoralist households across East Africa face major livestock losses during drought periods that can cause persistent
poverty. For Kenya and southern Ethiopia, an existing index insurance scheme aims to reduce the adverse
effects of such losses. The scheme insures individual households through an area-aggregated seasonal forage
scarcity index derived from remotely-sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. Until recently,
insurance contracts covered animal losses and indemnity payouts were consequently made late in the
season, based on a forage scarcity index incorporating both wet and dry season NDVI data. Season timing and duration
were fixed for the whole area (March–September for long rains, October–February for short rains). Due to
demand for asset protection insurance (pre-loss intervention) our aim was to identify earlier payout options by
shortening the temporal integration period of the index. We used 250 m-resolution 10-day NDVI composites for
2001–2014 from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). To better describe the period
during which forage develops, we first retrieved per-pixel average season start- and end-dates using a phenological
model. These dates were averaged per insurance unit to obtain unit-specific growing period definitions. With
these definitions a new forage scarcity index was calculated. We then examined if shortening the temporal period
further could effectively predict most (N90%) of the interannual variability of the new index, and assessed the
effects of shortening the period on indemnity payouts. Our analysis shows that insurance payouts could be made
one to three months earlier as compared to the current index definition, depending on the insurance unit. This
would allow pastoralists to use indemnity payments to protect their livestock through purchase of forage,
water, or medicines.
 
Date 2015-12-17
2016-06-05T16:28:56Z
2016-06-05T16:28:56Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier https://mel.cgiar.org/reporting/download/hash/fRnaRLxk
Anton Vrieling, Michele Meroni, Andrew Mude, Sommarat Chantarat, Caroline C. Ummenhofer, C. A. J. M. (Kees) de Bie. (17/12/2015). Early assessment of seasonal forage availability for mitigating the impact of drought on East African pastoralists. Remote Sensing of Environment, 174, pp. 44-55.
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11766/4813
Limited access
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-NC-4.0
 
Format PDF
 
Publisher Elsevier
 
Source Remote Sensing of Environment;174,(2015) Pagination 44,55