Daniel Osgood

International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University
sc32@columbia.edu
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Daniel Osgood brings advances in the use of climate information and financial mechanisms to improve livelihoods in developing countries. His Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley addressed the use of weather information in irrigated agriculture. He has been involved in insurance design and evaluation for development and adaptation oriented index insurance pilots in over a dozen countries, breaking barriers in index insurance through products with high take up and dramatic scaling. Tens of thousands of smallholder farmers have purchased contracts he has helped design in farmer-driven processes. Research contributions include work on the use of probabilistic information in decisionmaking, the valuation of environmental features, the use of remote sensing proxies in quantifying environmental amenities and environmental risk, the value of information in negotiation and markets, how uncertainty, risk, and information impacts negotiations between players, and work specific to index insurance, climate information, adaptation, and economic development. He has been awarded several million dollars of funding for his work. He has been involved in global policy processes such as the COP and GHF meetings and his work has received attention in popular press outlets such as the Guardian, Nature, the New York Times, and Reuters.