VO: This is what’s known as the Dry Corridor,
covering Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and
Nicaragua. Over the last ten years, this historically dry
region of Central America has been hit by the effects of climate change.
Extreme weather, like prolonged droughts, are taking its toll
on the region’s agriculture. Regions in the Dry Corridor
experience severe drought during the El Niño Southern Oscillation
cycle. For example, El Salvador has seen persistent droughts
each year between 2012 and 2018,
which has impacted the livelihoods of local farmers.
Cirilo: If it continues as it is today,
I will have to leave again because
there is no work here. One can’t survive in
El Salvador under these conditions. VO: To identify which
farmers are experiencing significant loss, local insurance providers
combine satellite data to figure out where to direct financial
protection. Local insurance agencies have been using NASA
data on precipitation to get a better a picture of the climatic
conditions in order to implement index insurance.
Index insurance pays out benefits based on a predetermined index,
such as the amount of rainfall in a region. Llabres: We try to assess which are the most
important risks for the whole country, and in many
cases those are climate-related and are aggravated by climate change.
That includes more severe and more frequent droughts,
and that includes also more excessive rainfall, more excessive
hydrological events. VO: Assessing the impacts
of extreme weather and individual losses all over El Salvador
would incur an enormous operational cost. For these regions,
that’s where satellites like TRMM and GPM can make
a huge difference. Llabres: When TRMM came to life a little
more than two decades ago, it was a high quality product that we were
now able to use to determine what happened in each
part of the country. The market of insurance can reach people
that it didn’t reach before, that it was too costly to reach
before that. Now we have more than twenty years of
satellite data from quality sources, such as NASA, including TRMM and
GPM, and now we can actually price an insurance component,
an insurance product, based on experience that we have collected
through these decades, and that we will continue to collect and
improve in the coming years.