“I used to be very cynical about climate change; I used to believe that we were not going to make it in terms of the net zero. Now, I’m hopeful. I think the technology is there, and we might do it.”
From Crisis to Coverage: Suyana & the Future of Climate Adaptation
February 3, 2025
In the past year alone, the Americas have been rocked by climate disasters, causing hundreds of fatalities, millions of lives impacted, and billions of dollars in damages. This includes Hurricanes Helene, Milton, and Beryl, flooding in southern Brazil, and the recent wildfires in the Greater Los Angeles area, among other catastrophic events.
A new report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce estimates that climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past ten years, with a 19% increase over the last two full years compared to the previous eight.
It’s important to note the climate protection gap: the difference between total economic losses from climate disasters and the portion covered by insurance. In 2023, only 31% of economic losses from natural disasters were insured, highlighting a significant gap that leaves individuals and entire communities vulnerable.
“What is happening now was already happening in the Global South many years ago,” said Rodrigo García, Co-Founder and CEO of Suyana Climate Insurance and a member of Halcyon’s 2023 Climate Resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Fellowship. “We were already feeling the impacts of extreme climate events, and there was no protection whatsoever.”
García and his Co-Founder and CTO, Fernando Yu, decided to enter the climate insurance market in the LAC region after realizing these disparities in their home countries—Bolivia and Argentina, respectively—and beyond.
Enter Suyana: their climate insurance tech venture that uses satellites to detect extreme weather and provide insurance payouts triggered by specific climate events. Suyana is unique through their use of parametric insurance; as opposed to traditional insurance, a human assessment is replaced with a parameter, or data point.
For instance, Suyana’s parameter for a drought product would be soil moisture, which they would detect using a radar. Similarly, parameters for a storm surge would be wave heights and wind intensity.
Parametric insurance was suggested in the Harvard Business Review in response to the estimated $250 billion in damages from the Los Angeles area wildfires, with the current system struggling to reconcile with these increasingly catastrophic climate disasters.
Yu believes Suyana’s model would be especially beneficial in a situation like these wildfires because they are able to pay within days instead waiting months or years—a norm for traditional indemnity. For Suyana’s consumers, as soon as a previously set climate threshold is crossed, automatic payments are triggered.
This provides Suyana with a critical advantage, according to Yu: “It’s more affordable, it’s more scalable, but it’s also more transparent, because we base our decisions on objective measures of losses instead of on human assessments.”



García placed Suyana’s first big bet in the “missing middle” of the business interruption space:
“What we learned from the [COVID-19] pandemic was that not a single glass was broken until billions of dollars were lost,” he said. “The same happens with natural catastrophes … We can provide protection for the incomes of families, for the installments of the payments of their mortgages, and commercial loans.”
Suyana have launched in-market in Bolivia and Peru, currently covering droughts, storm surges, floods, and hail. They’re slated to expand to Brazil in late 2025, providing the first satellite-based flood insurance in the region.
García and Yu oversee two projects in Bolivia, including one in collaboration with UNICEF. Bolivia recently experienced its worst drought in 30 years, devastating its agricultural sector and the farmers who survive on it. Suyana has created a combination of insurance and an early warning system for previously uninsured Bolivian smallholder farmers, preventing avoidable losses and thereby reducing the overall cost of their insurance.
Suyana’s business interruption product in Peru will serve at least 30,000 families of small-scale fisherman by providing insurance against the disturbances caused by abnormal wave heights on coastlines. Their work replaced a social protection program put in place by the Peruvian government which struggled to meet the needs of this economically and socially vulnerable population.
García considers Suyana’s work to contribute towards overall global climate adaptation goals. Adaptation contains a growing finance subsector that includes insurance ventures like Suyana that are providing “financial protection to vulnerable communities and economies from the impacts of climate change.”
Being part of Halcyon’s impact-driven global network has helped fuel Suyana’s growth in mission-aligned spaces, García explained.
“There’s always this exchange of information. We’ve been connected with potential investors through this network—there are a couple leads that have come out of that,” García said. “The most important thing is being part of this community.”
García and Yu are no strangers to the harsh realities in their line of work. As one example, García cited the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report, which placed extreme weather events as the top risk of the next decade.
What keeps the Suyana team hopeful is the combination of their innovative insurance model and advanced technology.
“There’s more satellite data, there are better climate models, and with those, we can build our solutions,” García said. “And the promise in this parametric space is huge … If you have IoT devices, or you have sensors, … you could potentially insure anything, right? Any phenomenon that happens in nature could potentially be modeled and subject to evaluation of parametric insurance.”
The global parametric insurance market was valued at $18 billion in 2023, and is projected to reach $34.4 billion by 2033, increasing at a CAGR of 6.6%.
Ultimately, the team’s overarching goal is an ambitious one: to insure 1 billion people within the next decade.
Halcyon is committed to supporting innovative founders and ventures through our Climate vertical focus, which empowers entrepreneurs across the United States and the globe tackling our world’s greatest climate challenges through solutions that address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. In 2025, four out of our seven planned programs will fall within this Climate vertical, including our DMV Climate Innovation Fellowship, our Climate Resilience and Food Security in Africa Fellowship, our Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Climate Fellowship, and our residential Climate Fellowship. To explore past Halcyon fellows and ventures in the Climate space, visit this link.