Journal Article

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

Garschagen, Matthias, Hagenlocher, Michael, Doshi, Deepal, Reith, Jonathan

2021

Overview

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 paper analyses and compares the design, data, and results of four of the leading global climate and disaster risk indices: The World Risk Index, the INFORM Risk Index, ND-GAIN Index, and the Climate Risk Index. Our analysis clearly shows that there is considerable degree of cross-index variation regarding countries’ risk levels and comparative ranks. At the same time, there is above-average agreement for high-risk countries. In terms of risk sub-components, there is surprisingly little agreement in the results on hazard exposure, while strong inter-index correlations can be observed when ranking countries according to their socio-economic vulnerability and lack of coping as well as adaptive capacity. Vulnerability and capacity hotspots can hence be identified more robustly than risk and exposure hotspots. Our findings speak both to the potential as well as limitations of index-based approaches. They show that a solid understanding of index-based assessment tools, and their conceptual and methodological underpinnings, is necessary to navigate them properly and interpret as well as use their results in triangulation.

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Agreements / Atmospheric Sciences / Averages / Capacity / Climate / Climate change / Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts / Climate policy / Climatic analysis / Climatic indexes / Comparative studies / Coping / Disaster risk / Disasters / Earth and Environmental Science / Earth Sciences / Economics / Environmental policy / Environmental risk / Exposure / Global climate / High risk / Hot spots / Indexes / Popularity / Prioritizing / Risk / Risk & Vulnerability to Extreme Events: Dynamics and Future Scenarios / Risk analysis / Risk levels / Socioeconomic aspects / Socioeconomic factors / socioeconomics / Triangulation / Vulnerability