While climate risks are on the rise, a growing variety of tools aims to reduce the impact on poor and vulnerable people. Among those tools, social protection stands out as a proven set of instruments when it comes to reducing risks in a context of poverty and vulnerability. However, social protection instruments are still to prove their role in building resilience against extreme climate. Evidence from the Garantia Safra programme, a public index-based climate risk insurance scheme in Brazil, suggests that uncovering social protection’s potential to build resilience still requires some work, especially when it comes to long-term solutions. The programme struggles to alleviate smallholders’ acute suffering after an extreme climate event, and it hardly enables them to build their resilience in the long term. The results suggest a context-based assessment of the efficiency and effectiveness of public climate risk insurance schemes.