The Lemonade Foundation Turns to Blockchain to Protect Subsistence Farmers from Climate Change

Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition to offer climate insurance to the world’s most vulnerable farmers.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
The Lemonade Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Lemonade to effect exponential social and environmental impact through technology, announced today the formation of the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition.

The coalition is being constituted as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), dedicated to building and distributing at-cost, instantaneous, parametric weather insurance to subsistence farmers and livestock keepers in emerging markets. Alongside the Lemonade Foundation, founding coalition members include Avalanche, Chainlink, DAOstack, Etherisc, Hannover Re, Pula, and Tomorrow.io.

The climate insurance will be architected as a stablecoin-denominated, decentralized application (dApp) on Avalanche, an eco-friendly proof-of-stake blockchain. Farmers will be able to make and receive payments with ease from their phone using global stablecoins or local currencies, much as they do for banking and payments today. An initial rollout in Africa is expected within the year.

“The Lemonade Foundation was established to build exponentially-impactful technologies,” said Daniel Schreiber, Director at the Lemonade Foundation. “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.”

The Lemonade Foundation will provide the initial capital to backstop the DAO’s smart contracts, and in time all crypto investors will be able to fund the DAO’s liquidity pool. The DAO will also issue a governance token to reward participation by the broader community.

“Africa has an estimated 300 million smallholder farmers. The majority face real climate risks to their livelihoods, as traditional, indemnity-based insurance is often unaffordable or unavailable to them,” said Rose Goslinga, co-founder of Pula, a Kenya-based insurtech that specializes in digital and agricultural insurance to de-risk millions of smallholder farmers across Africa. “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.”

“We've been helping developers and institutions usher in a new age of economic fairness and transparency with web3. The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition is a prime example of how innovative solutions built on the blockchain can drive global financial inclusion previously unavailable," said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, the market-leading blockchain oracle solution. “We plan to make the Chainlink team and platform available to L3C in an effort to protect the millions of farmers who depend on what they grow from the devastation of climate change."

Read more about the Lemonade Foundation and the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition here.

The Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition will be presented at the Avalanche Summit on March 23, 2022.

About The Lemonade Foundation

The Lemonade Foundation is a nonprofit organized under IRC section 501(c)(4). The foundation was founded by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger and funded by Lemonade shareholders prior to the company’s IPO. The Lemonade Foundation is an independent legal entity, and is not owned or controlled by Lemonade, Inc. or its shareholders. Lemonade’s founders currently serve as directors in the foundation.

More information can be found at www.lemonade.org.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition by deploying on Avalanche. Don’t believe it? Try an app on Avalanche today. https://www.avax.network/

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

About DAOstack

Founded in 2017, DAOstack has pioneered the DAO space by creating the first operational on-chain DAO platform, on top of which the DXdao is now managing a treasury of over $70M, being the world’s largest on-chain DAO. Currently, DAOstack is paving the road towards DAO 2.0, a social operating system for large-scale collaboration allowing millions of people to self-organize around shared goals and solve complex, global challenges.

About Etherisc

Etherisc’s goal is to make insurance fair and accessible through its open-source, decentralized insurance protocol to collectively build insurance products on the Ethereum blockchain. Its open-source common infrastructure, the Generic Insurance Framework (GIF), includes shared smart contracts, product templates, microservices and the native cryptographic token (DIP) to enable the seamless and efficient creation of decentralized insurance products, with increased transparency and fairness for all parties.

Since its launch in 2016 by a team of legal, financial, and mathematical visionaries, the Etherisc protocol has been reimagining insurance solutions to democratize the process in the interest of the consumer. Projects currently hosted on Etherisc’s open-source Generic Insurance Framework include FlightDelay Insurance, Crop Insurance, and Hurricane Protection.

About Hannover Re

Hannover Re, with gross premium of more than EUR 27 billion, is the third-largest reinsurer in the world. It transacts all lines of property & casualty and life & health reinsurance and is present on all continents with more than 3,000 staff. Established in 1966, the Hannover Re Group today has a network of more than 170 subsidiaries, branches and representative offices worldwide. The Group's German business is written by the subsidiary E+S Rück. The rating agencies most relevant to the insurance industry have awarded both Hannover Re and E+S Rück outstanding financial strength ratings: Standard & Poor's AA- "Very Strong" and A.M. Best A+ "Superior".

About Pula

Pula is a Kenya-based insurtech that designs and delivers agricultural insurance and digital products. These products help smallholder farmers endure climate risks, improve their farming practices, and bolster their incomes over time. As of 2021, Pula had insured over 65.1 million smallholder farmers at a total sum of $1.41 billion across 15 countries across Africa and Asia through its flagship Area Yield Index Insurance product. Pula has won numerous awards, including the Singapore Fintech award, Women’s World Banking award, African Insurance award and the Credit Suisse Innovation award. In 2021, U+ named Pula as one of the “Top InsurTech Innovators to Watch”.

About Tomorrow.io

Tomorrow.io is The World’s leading Weather and Climate Security Platform, helping countries, businesses, and individuals manage their weather and climate security challenges. The platform is fully customizable to any industry impacted by the weather. Customers around the world, including Uber, Delta, Ford, National Grid, and more use Tomorrow.io to dramatically improve operational efficiency. Tomorrow.io was built from the ground up to help teams prepare for the business impact of weather by automating decision-making and enabling climate adaptation at scale. To learn more, please go to: www.tomorrow.io

About Tomorrow Now

TomorrowNow is a visionary 501(c)(3) non-profit founded to bridge the latest weather security innovations with communities most in need. Our motivation? To ensure EVERYONE, even the poorest in society, can survive and thrive in our changing climate. The consequences of climate change are unfolding now and those most impacted are least equipped to act and adapt. TomorrowNow connects the latest climate action data and tools to at-risk communities so people can be better prepared today, while also investing in long-term transformation of weather systems to ensure inclusivity and sustainability for tomorrow.

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Lisa Horton
[email protected]

Source: The Lemonade Foundation