Dataset Information

Index insurance for pro-poor conservation of hornbills in Thailand.

ABSTRACT: This study explores the potential of index insurance as a mechanism to finance community-based biodiversity conservation in areas where a strong correlation exists between natural disaster risk, keystone species populations, and the well-being of the local population. We illustrate this potential using the case of hornbill conservation in the Budo-Sungai Padi rainforests of southern Thailand, using 16-y hornbill reproduction data and 5-y household expenditures data reflecting local economic well-being. We show that severe windstorms cause both lower household expenditures and critical nest tree losses that directly constrain nesting capacity and so reduce the number of hornbill chicks recruited in the following breeding season. Forest residents' coping strategies further disturb hornbills and their forest habitats, compounding windstorms' adverse effects on hornbills' recruitment in the following year. The strong statistical relationship between wind speed and both hornbill nest tree losses and household expenditures opens up an opportunity to design wind-based index insurance contracts that could both enhance hornbill conservation and support disaster-affected households in the region. We demonstrate how such contracts could be written and operationalized and then use simulations to show the significant promise of unique insurance-based approaches to address weather-related risk that threatens both biodiversity and poor populations.

SUBMITTER: Chantarat S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3161535 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Index insurance for pro-poor conservation of hornbills in Thailand.

Chantarat Sommarat S Barrett Christopher B CB Janvilisri Tavan T Mudsri Sittichai S Niratisayakul Chularat C Poonswad Pilai P

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20110822 34

This study explores the potential of index insurance as a mechanism to finance community-based biodiversity conservation in areas where a strong correlation exists between natural disaster risk, keystone species populations, and the well-being of the local population. We illustrate this potential using the case of hornbill conservation in the Budo-Sungai Padi rainforests of southern Thailand, using 16-y hornbill reproduction data and 5-y household expenditures data reflecting local economic well ...[more]

PMID: 21873183

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Project description:BackgroundRemoving financial barriers and making healthcare accessible to all who need it remains an essential component of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Pro-poor healthcare financing schemes are policies that enable patients to concentrate on obtaining absolute medical care when needed rather than worrying about the cost of care. The demand for health services in healthcare facilities has increased tremendously due to the increasing burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases. This potentially threatens the sustainability of pro-poor health financing schemes. This study seeks to synthesize literature and map evidence on the use of health promotion and disease prevention interventions as a strategy to sustaining pro-poor health financing schemes globally.MethodsWe will conduct a systematic scoping review utilizing the Arksey and O'Malley framework, Levac et al. recommendations, and the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines. A comprehensive keyword search for relevant published articles will be conducted in MEDLINE through PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, SCOPUS, CINAHL, and Science Direct from 1 January 2000 to the last search date in 2021. Limiters such as date and language (English) will be applied, but study design limitations will be removed during the search. Boolean term AND/OR Medical Subject Heading terms will also be included. The reference list of all included articles will also be searched for potentially eligible articles. Two investigators will independently screen the articles in parallel at the abstract and full-text stages using the eligibility criteria designed in a Google form. Charting of data will also be conducted independently by two investigators using a piloted data abstraction form and thematic analysis conducted. The emerging themes will be collated, summarized, and the results reported.DiscussionWe hope to provide evidence of diverse health promotion and disease prevention policies/strategies used by countries to sustain their pro-poor health financing schemes for possible adoption by other countries. We also anticipate finding research gaps for further studies to help find innovative contextualized health prevention and promotion strategies to sustain pro-poor health financing schemes especially those in LMICs. The findings will be comprehensively discussed and disseminated at conferences and publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Project description:Agricultural index insurance contracts increasingly use remote sensing data to estimate losses and determine indemnity payouts. Index insurance contracts inevitably make errors, failing to detect losses that occur and issuing payments when no losses occur. The quality of these contracts and the indices on which they are based, need to be evaluated to assess their fitness as insurance, and to provide a guide to choosing the index that best protects the insured. In the remote sensing literature, indices are often evaluated with generic model evaluation statistics such as R2 or Root Mean Square Error that do not directly consider the effect of errors on the quality of the insurance contract. Economic analysis suggests using measures that capture the impact of insurance on the expected economic well-being of the insured. To bridge the gap between the remote sensing and economic perspectives, we adopt a standard economic measure of expected well-being and transform it into a Relative Insurance Benefit (RIB) metric. RIB expresses the welfare benefits derived from an index insurance contract relative to a hypothetical contract that perfectly measures losses. RIB takes on its maximal value of one when the index contract offers the same economic benefits as the perfect contract. When it achieves none of the benefits of insurance it takes on a value of zero, and becomes negative if the contract leaves the insured worse off than having no insurance. Part of our contribution is to decompose this economic well-being measure into an asymmetric loss function. We also argue that the expected well-being measure we use has advantages over other economic measures for the normative purpose of insurance quality ascertainment. Finally, we illustrate the use of the RIB measure with a case study of potential livestock insurance contracts in Northern Kenya. We compared 24 indices that were made with 4 different statistical models and 3 remote sensing data sources. RIB for these indices ranged from 0.09 to 0.5, and R2 ranged from 0.2 to 0.51. While RIB and R2 were correlated, the model with the highest RIB did not have the highest R2. Our findings suggest that, when designing and evaluating an index insurance program, it is useful to separately consider the quality of a remote sensing-based index with a metric like the RIB instead of a generic goodness-of-fit metric.

Project description:In higher vertebrates, phagocytosis plays a critical role in development and immunity, based on the internalization and removal of apoptotic cells and invading pathogens, respectively. Previous studies describe the effective uptake of these particles by lower vertebrate and invertebrate phagocytes, and identify important molecular players that contribute to this internalization. However, it remains unclear if individual phagocytes mediate internalization processes in these ancient organisms, and how this impacts the balance of pro-inflammatory and homeostatic events within their infection sites. Herein we show that individual phagocytes of the jawless vertebrate Petromyzon marinus (sea lamprey), like those of teleost fish and mice, display the capacity for divergent pro-inflammatory and homeostatic responses following internalization of zymosan and apoptotic cells, respectively. Professional phagocytes (macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils) were the primary contributors to the internalization of pro-inflammatory particles among goldfish (C. auratus) and lamprey (P. marinus) hematopoietic leukocytes. However, goldfish showed a greater ability for zymosan phagocytosis when compared to their jawless counterparts. Coupled to this increase was a significantly lower sensitivity of goldfish phagocytes to homeostatic signals derived from apoptotic cell internalization. Together, this translated into a significantly greater capacity for induction of antimicrobial respiratory burst responses compared to lamprey phagocytes, but also a decreased efficacy in apoptotic cell-driven leukocyte homeostatic mechanisms that attenuate this pro-inflammatory process. Overall, our results show the long-standing evolutionary contribution of intrinsic phagocyte mechanisms for the control of inflammation, and illustrate one effective evolutionary strategy for increased responsiveness against invading pathogens. In addition, they highlight the need for development of complementary regulatory mechanisms of inflammation to ensure continued maintenance of host integrity amidst increasing challenges from invading pathogens.

Dataset Information

Index insurance for pro-poor conservation of hornbills in Thailand.

Publications

Index insurance for pro-poor conservation of hornbills in Thailand.

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