Assessing systemic climate change risk by country. Reflections from the use of composite indicators

This paper proposes a transparent and replicable methodology to rank countries according to climate change risk through a composite indicator approach. We show that adherence to the IPCC definition of risk easily leads to a dominance of the exposure component in risk determination. This, on its turn, produces a country risk ranking that can differ also substantively from that of other indicators used for similar purposes, especially by rating agencies. These last indicators are, in fact, closer to the concept of vulnerability to climate change, than risk. Our major conclusion is that by accounting for all the components of risk, the dichotomy "high-climate-change-risk developing countries" vs "low climate-change-risk developed countries" blurs substantively, while climate risk becomes relatively higher than commonly considered in the latter group.