ND-GAIN Country Index

After much talk about the vulnerability indexes and their diverse nature in the previous blog posts (heat vulnerability, gender vulnerability...), we finally analyse here a comprehensive vulnerability index which allows us to assess the exposure of one country to climate change along with its responsiveness to that change and finally the financial and policy opportunities which it's investing in minimizing such impact. 

ND-GAIN measures vulnerability across six components, including food, water, health, human habitat, infrastructure and ecosystem services, for sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity to climate risks.

The data collected composes 74 variables to form 45 core indicators to measure vulnerability and readiness on a time span of 20+ years.The data is gathered from several sub-indicators,  and converted into a common scale (normal distribution, ranking, percentage range) in order to obtain the same measurement scale and therefore convert all these parameters into one comprehensive index where ND-Gain = readiness - vulnerability.



The final outcome can as well be visually represented into a a scatter plot of readiness against vulnerability, that is, the ND-GAIN Matrix which allows to the reader an easy visualization of the positioning of each country and their potential for development or oppositely their strong point.


It is my opinion, that the main limitation resulting from using this index is that it considers only country related data, not including the impact which climate change in neighbouring countries might have on the subject of study. In this way, it does not consider for example the worsening of climate warming in under-developed countries which will eventually impact the adaptation of economically more advanced ones. The only way to achieve overall global mitigation of climate change is so that if we all UN countries consider the financial, social, economic policies as a cohesive approach towards a common goal which in fact would eventually affect us all in a more or less catastrophic way. 
The EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen commented in her speech regarding the energy crisis in September 2022 to Bruxelles inspiring the State Members to take this socio-political situation right now as an opportunity to speed up our transition towards renewable energy and reduction in GHG emissions as a whole EU community and not by considering ourselves as individual members, "at the beginning of the war, if you looked at the imported gas, 40% of it was Russian gas, since a long time. Today, we are down to 9% only.", she continues mentioning with regard to our greatest source of energy "The renewables are cheap, they are home-grown, they make us independent.". However, this can be only achieved when, for example, solar energy abounding countries such as the Mediterranean ones provide the electricity at a non-competitive price to Northern countries where solar energy is very weak. Hence as well avoiding to create a highly inflated market of commodities among the EU States and stop the prioritization of the current increasingly competitive business in favour of a long term more sustainable future.

In conclusion, as stated in the study by Garschagen 2021, there are many vulnerability indexes currently utilized by academics, The World Risk Index, the INFORM Risk Index, ND-GAIN Index, and the Climate Risk Index, which all agree to a certain extent that the country's vulnerability and capacity hotspots can be robustly defined, however differ in evaluating risk and exposure hotspots. Nonetheless, they present a lack of clarity on the consistency of assessment results across different indices, therefore preventing policy makers from taking coherent scientific decisions, for example targeting countries as "most risky" based on the outcomes of these indexes. 

References:

Garschagen, M., Doshi, D., Reith, J. et al. Global patterns of disaster and climate risk—an analysis of the consistency of leading index-based assessments and their results. Climatic Change 169, 11 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03209-7

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_22_5389

https://gain.nd.edu/our-work/country-index/

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