The United Nations’ climate change framework mandates just compensation for the victims of Anthropocene disasters, but monetizing the losses and damages from extreme weather is far from straightforward. Unlike physical modeling of the climate system, determining whose perspective counts when evaluating climate impacts is a normative matter, with no technocratic standard. Relief money is often allocated through disaster insurance and catastrophe bond markets, but in the Global South, communities lack the data and voice to make their claims legible to actuarial modelers. In the absence of local guidance, financial firms tend to rely on proprietary data and assumptions, and exploitative and ill-suited compensation policies have proliferated in the gap.
To address this disparity, the international community needs new standards for measuring climate impacts which reflect the perspective of vulnerable communities. Max Mauerman presents one such approach through a study of agricultural drought risk in Zambia, drawing on a novel, nationally representative dataset of nearly 1,000 farmer focus groups. He finds that incorporating farmers’ recollected historical impacts into drought risk estimation would result in models that are more accurate and robust than conventional, crop yield-based valuation methods, illustrating the importance of co-produced knowledge in understanding the human impacts of disasters.
Event Speaker
Max Mauerman, Senior Staff Associate at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.
