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About INFORM Climate Change

INFORM Climate Change complements INFORM Suite by providing quantified estimates of the impacts of climate change on the future risk of humanitarian crises and disasters globally.

What is INFORM Climate Change Risk Index?

INFORM Climate Change Risk Index is based on the INFORM Risk Index. It incorporates climate and socioeconomic projections to analyse how risk will evolve as a result of climate change under different emission and socio-economic scenarios.

Why do we need INFORM Climate Change Risk Index?

Climate change has already shown diverse adverse impacts on human systems. Higher levels of humanitarian aid will be essential to alleviate the future extreme weather-related human suffering, fatalities, injuries and displacement. Having in place a risk assessment tool that includes climate change projections and future adaptation measures would be an important contribution for humanitarian and development sector in terms of horizon scanning and global humanitarian risk monitoring.

Objectives

The objective of INFORM Climate Change is to inform decision-making around the risk of climate-amplified hazards, as well as how increased risks could be offset by improved vulnerability and coping capacity. Specifically, it is intended to:
  • Lead to a shared and objective understanding of the impact of climate change on the risk of humanitarian crises
  • Support policy-making that leads to greater resilience to the adverse impacts of climate change
  • Support decisions on the allocation of DRR and climate adaptation resources that is consistent with SDG and Sendai targets
  • Identify inequalities in climate impacts, for example on marginalised groups like people on the move

Development process

The development of the INFORM Climate Change Risk Index was initiated in 2019 as a collaboration between the Joint Research Centre of European Commission and Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (within the project - RECEIPT  - Remote Climate Effects and their Impact on European sustainability, Policy and Trade funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 820712).
Since then, the technical development of the INFORM Climate Change Risk Index has been continuously presented to and consulted with the INFORM partners in several stages.
In 2021, the first results of the analysis were peer-reviewed and published in the journal of Global Environmental Change .
In collaboration with INFORM partners, a policy report has been prepared and published as a contributing paper to UNDRR Global Assessment Report 2022 .
From the 13th October 2022, a report on concept and methodology of INFORM Climate Change Risk Index, a brochure with results and findings from the INFORM Climate Change analysis as well as INFORM Climate Change interactive tool are available online.
Future developments will focus on extending the index with available projections of various drivers of vulnerability and coping capacity such as social characteristics, migration, governance, urbanization, infrastructure, and health status.