Historical extension of operational NDVI products for livestock insurance in Kenya

Droughts induce livestock losses that severely affect Kenyan pastoralists. Recent index insurance schemeshave the potential of being a viable tool for insuring pastoralists against drought-related risk. Suchschemes require as input a forage scarcity (or drought) index that can be reliably updated in near real-time, and that strongly relates to livestock mortality. Generally, a long record (>25 years) of the index isneeded to correctly estimate mortality risk and calculate the related insurance premium. Data from cur-rent operational satellites used for large-scale vegetation monitoring span over a maximum of 15 years, atime period that is considered insufficient for accurate premium computation. This study examines howoperational NDVI datasets compare to, and could be combined with the non-operational recently con-structed 30-year GIMMS AVHRR record (1981–2011) to provide a near-real time drought index with a longterm archive for the arid lands of Kenya. We compared six freely available, near-real time NDVI products:five from MODIS and one from SPOT-VEGETATION. Prior to comparison, all datasets were averaged intime for the two vegetative seasons in Kenya, and aggregated spatially at the administrative division levelat which the insurance is offered. The feasibility of extending the resulting aggregated drought indicesback in time was assessed using jackknifed R2statistics (leave-one-year-out) for the overlapping period2002–2011. We found that division-specific models were more effective than a global model for linkingthe division-level temporal variability of the index between NDVI products. Based on our results, goodscope exists for historically extending the aggregated drought index, thus providing a longer operationalrecord for insurance purposes. We showed that this extension may have large effects on the calculatedinsurance premium. Finally, we discuss several possible improvements to the drought index.

VRIELING A.;  MERONI Michele;  SHEE Apurba;  MUDE Andrew;  WOODARD Hoshua;  DE BIE Kees;  REMBOLD Felix; 

2014-11-27

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC92453

0303-2434,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303243413001785,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC92453,   

10.1016/j.jag.2013.12.010,