An Index of Physical Vulnerability to Climate Change

For more than 10 years, FERDI has been calculating and regularly updating a Physical Vulnerability to Climate Change Index (PVCCI). This work has been documented in several working papers, policy briefs and published in Ecological Economics (Feindouno, Guillaumont and Simonet, 2020).

Freely available, the PVCCI measures the geophysical risks faced by countries as a result of climate change. The index is structural in nature, as it relies on exogenous factors that are independent of the countries' present policies. Therefore it, can be used in the definition of the multidimensional vulnerability index.

The PVCCI is calculated for 191 countries; and to highlight the heterogeneity of the physical vulnerability of territories to climate change, a disaggregated PVCCI at the sub-national level has recently been calculated (Goujon, Santoni and Wagner, 2022).