A Novel Extreme Weather Risk Insurance System for Kenya (NEWRISK): Encouraging preparedness, planning, community co-design, and protection of Kenya’s health system from the effects of extreme weather

Question How can we protect Kenya's health system from extreme weather and can climate risk insurance help? Background Kenya is a frontline country for extreme weather and faces long droughts, flooding and heat waves.

There are significant direct health risks resulting from extreme weather, but we will focus on the broader, pervasive health risks associated with the reduction or catastrophic withdrawal of health services.

Climate risk insurance has proved a success in areas such as agriculture by encouraging buyers who face diverse risks to purchase cover that pays out when agreed climatic criteria are met. These systems encourage adaptation and resilience by reducing payments if certain risk-reducing preparations are made.

A climate risk insurance product for a health system would need data detailing: the extremity and geography of hazards; the populations affected; and the subsequent risks to determine premiums. A health system prepared for climate change should have all of this information even if it is not insured.

Aim Our aim is to determine what extreme weather hazards Kenya faces, and how resulting impacts on the population and health service can be mitigated, creating scalable tools that inform planning and allow us to determine if a climate risk insurance system could help.

Objectives and Methods We will use the latest climate analysis techniques to provide high resolution data on heat and precipitation for the whole of Kenya. We will then create a population vulnerability index so as to spatially represent vulnerable populations across Kenya.

We will seek to create a tool for the assessment of health facilities' readiness for extreme weather and then use this tool to collect data on the readiness of public health facilities across four counties.

We will map this data to understand the interactions between extreme weather, population vulnerability, and the health system.

We will present this information to community members and use qualitative community engagement methods to understand their priorities. Each work package finding will be presented to our stakeholder group, including county health teams.

Finally, we will use a variety of health economics methods to estimate the costs of doing nothing and the costs and risks associated with various protective strategies.

Timelines for delivery Phase 1: Engagement with stakeholders and community members, applications for ethics permissions, recruitment and detailed planning. Phase 2: Collection, analysis and spatial mapping of data.

Phase 3: Drawing on the research to create the most effective policies and to determine if climate risk insurance is an effective solution.

Anticipated impact and dissemination We will create a set of tools and methods that can be combined to analyse the extreme weather threats posed to health systems and vulnerable populations.

These tools can be used separately to help understand and prepare for extreme weather or can be combined to inform a climate risk insurance product for health systems.

We expect both the tools and our analysis of potential insurance systems to provide policymakers with practical approaches to protect their health systems and populations.