The Lemonade Foundation to use blockchain to insure millions of small farmers against climate risks

The Lemonade Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Lemonade and which aims to use technology to bring about social and environmental change, has announced a new blockchain-based initiative targeted at protecting the most vulnerable of small-scale farmers from the perils of climate change.

The project is dubbed “the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition” and has partnered with several blockchain platforms, the New York-based non-profit said on Tuesday.

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Some of the members in the coalition include Chainlink, Avalanche, DAOstack and Etherisc. We also have German reinsurance firm Hannover Re, Kenyan-based insurtech Pula and US weather technology company Tomorrow.io.

Smart contracts instead of insurance policies

According to Lemonade Foundation, the members have together formed a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO). The collective aim of the crypto-focused project is to build and distribute “at-cost, instantaneous, parametric weather insurance to subsistence farmers and livestock keepers in emerging markets.”

“By using a DAO instead of a traditional insurance company, smart contracts instead of insurance policies, and oracles instead of claims professionals, we expect to harness the communal and decentralized aspects of web3 and real-time weather data to deliver affordable and instantaneous climate insurance to the people who need it most,” said Daniel Schreiber, Director at the Lemonade Foundation.

The climate insurance project will first launch in Africa, with expectations of this happening within the year.

According to Kenyan-based agricultural insurance provider Pula, there are nearly 300 million small-scale farmers in Africa. The majority of them are impacted by real climate risks, with no access to traditional, indemnity-based insurance.

“This is where the power of the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition comes in: An on-chain solution that can be immediately impactful at scale will allow farmers to finally get  financially protected against the increasingly frequent risks such as drought,” Pula co-founder Rose Goslinga said in a statement.

Currently, Pula has 5.1 million farmers insured, according to data on the startup’s website.

Avalanche-based dApp

Per details shared with Invezz, the DAO will run on the Avalanche network.

Farmers will access the insurance services via a decentralised application (dApp) on the proof-of-stake platform, where they can make or receive mobile-based payments in global stablecoins or local currency.

Lemonade Foundation will provide the initial funding, with the others adding to the liquidity. There will also be a governance token to be allocated to those in the broader community who make contributions to the DAO.