Chile – Building agricultural resilience to climate risks
This case study describes the Republic of Chile’s approach to building agricultural resilience to natural hazard-induced disasters, particularly climate risks. It outlines two areas of strength, namely, Chile’s national agroclimatic risk information system – this consists of a series of interconnected platforms, agroclimatic information bulletins, tools and initiatives to monitor, identify, assess and communicate the risks, and, the country’s capacity development events and training, which support decision making by agricultural stakeholders on how to avoid and reduce the adverse impacts of natural hazard-induced disasters. This case study further outlines a variety of financial instruments that are available to fund emergency response and recovery activities in the agricultural sector and to transfer risk through the provision of state subsidies for agricultural insurance.
The findings show that Chile has a clearly delineated disaster risk management roles and responsibilities and a broad range of agroclimatic information platforms and products are available. Furthermore, training and outreach activities targeting both institutional actors and producers. Initiatives have been organized in recent years to strengthen capacities in disaster risk management, including training sessions, workshops, and seasonal outlook events. These have targeted different agricultural stakeholders. Data useful for disaster risk management is also being collected and risk transfer mechanisms and emergency response resources are established. There is room for improvement, namely in enhancing the involvement of agro services in disaster risk management, increase the dissemination and use of agroclimatic information platforms and products, training agricultural producers and extensionists on agriculture disaster risk management, improving access and analysis of existing data to inform disaster risk management strategies, and developing a financial strategy for disaster risk management in the agriculture sector.