Bringing innovative climate-risk financing to ASEAN’s agricultural sector (AgriCRF)

Context

In most Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the agricultural sector is the main source of income for the population. However, productivity has been increasingly affected by extreme weather events. Moreover, there are only limited financial services available to better protect smallholder farmers and their agricultural production against climate risks.

Although climate-risk financing has been recently promoted and agricultural insurance schemes are demonstrating some early successes in the ASEAN region, financial services and the technical aspects of ongoing initiatives still need to be supported with knowledge and innovations. In addition, awareness and financial literacy concerning the climate-risk financing of farmers and relevant actors still require improvement.

Objective

Farmers' access to resilience-enhancing and gender-responsive climate risk financing is improving.

Approach

The project goals are to:

• promote the topic of climate-risk finance for the agricultural sector in ASEAN through regional technical exchanges and policy document(s) development on climate risk financing, 
• support financial institutions in developing and improving climate-risk finance products and provide training for financial institutions,
• increase the professional competences of farmers and non-financial institutions by developing a training program and conducting trainings for partner organisations and target groups on the topic,
• linking sustainability standards to climate-risk finance by contributing to a standard revision process and participating in consultation processes that link agricultural sustainability standards to gender-responsive climate-risk finance.

Last update: May 2023