Global patterns of disaster and climate risk—an analysis of the consistency of leading index-based assessments and their results

This paper analyses and compares the design, data, and results of four of the leading global climate and disaster risk indices: The World Risk Index (WRI), the INFORM Risk Index (INFORM), ND-GAIN Index (GAIN), and the Climate Risk Index. Indices assessing country-level climate and disaster risk at the global scale have experienced a steep rise in popularity both in science and international climate policy. A number of widely cited products have been developed and published over the recent years, argued to contribute critical knowledge for prioritizing action and funding. However, it remains unclear how their results compare, and how consistent their findings are on country-level risk, exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping, as well as adaptive capacity.

This study reveals a mixed picture. Out of the four leading global multi-hazard risk indices which were analyzed and compared, WRI, INFORM, and GAIN are built more or less closely around the current mainstream conceptual thinking which in risk and climate research. They all use sub-components on hazard, exposure, socio-economic vulnerability, and the (lack of) short-term as well as long-term capacity to cope with and adapt to hazards. They also have a rather similar approach to utilizing data. CRI, on the other hand, is centered around a simpler outcome-oriented assessment of past hazard impacts. Not surprisingly, therefore, the former three indices show comparatively strong correlations between each other, but not with the CRI. Surprisingly, the correlations in the sub-components related to social, economic and institutional parameters are much higher than those for the hazard exposure and overall risk components. This means that global vulnerability and lack of capacity hotspots can be identified and ranked much more consistently than hotspots of overall risk or hazard exposure.