The project ADAPT focuses on interventions that can help households to adapt and reduce their vulnerability to extreme weather events in developing countries. The impact of two adaptation interventions on households is evaluated. The first adaptation intervention is an index-based weather insurance that provides indemnity payments to insured households in the aftermath of an extreme weather event whenever an index measured at a more aggregated geographical level has exceeded or fallen short of a predefined threshold. The second adaptation intervention is the provision of meteorological data to households.
The research is conducted in Mongolia, which is a prime example of a developing country that is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events, in particular, harsh winters (called dzud in Mongolian) triggered by extremely cold temperatures and excessive snowfall that cause mass livestock mortality.
