Measuring climate resilience: INFORM Climate Change Risk

INFORM Risk is a global multi-hazard risk assessment tool that combines hazards, exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping capacity indicators with the purpose to quantify the risk of humanitarian crisis.

It was developed in response to needs of numerous organizations to improve the common evidence basis for risk analysis. Recent collaboration between the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change the Joint Research Centre of European Commission results in an upgrade of the risk index that includes projections of exposure to climate-related hazards (floods and droughts) and allows us to estimate what level of vulnerability and lack of coping capacity reduction would be required to offset increasing risk.

The largest mid-century vulnerability and lack of coping capacity gap are observed in much of Europe, Western and Northern Asia and Africa. Countries located in such regions will need heavy investments in reducing vulnerability and increasing coping capacity to keep the manageable risk levels.

Changes to risk and vulnerability (lack of coping capacity) are mainly driven by increases in climate-related hazards rather than changes of exposure.

Hence, Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation should be the main policy response to mitigate the adverse effects of climate-related amplified hazard and risk.

The Joint Research Centre of European Commission is the scientific and technical lead, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is the coordinator of INFORM.

Links: 
- https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/science-update/inform-climate-change-risk
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021001722