Opinion: Building climate resilience requires holistic data

The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly intense and frequently felt. In 2021, a quarter, 27%, of the world’s population reported experiencing harm from severe weather, up five percentage points from 2019. What is more, that harm is often unevenly distributed among those least equipped to cope with it.

There is a growing awareness around the world that building true resilience to these changes requires a holistic understanding of resilience — an understanding that takes into account “soft” socioeconomic factors such as personal agency and community support, as well as more tangible physical infrastructure considerations.

However, the data required to inform and support interventions to improve resilience across all its different dimensions is often lacking. That is why, as part of our biennial World Risk Poll — the first global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety — Lloyd’s Register Foundation created a new resilience index.

This World Risk Poll Resilience Index provides a valuable information resource for policymakers and practitioners working on resilience and adaptation, helping to identify vulnerabilities and target interventions including in relation to particular demographics for which we can disaggregate the data.

The index was constructed by asking around 125,000 people in 121 countries about their perspectives on the resilience of their communities across four different domains:

1.  Individual

An underrated aspect of resilience, in relation to climate change and associated severe weather events, lies at the individual level. People’s sense of agency — how well they feel personally able to respond to these shocks — can to some extent become self-fulfilling, either boosting or undermining a collective disaster response.

Within the World Risk Poll, we asked people if they felt there was anything they could do to protect themselves and their families in the event of a disaster. Only about half, 52%, of people worldwide said yes. However, the poll did point to something that can be done to improve this statistic: People with internet access were 24 percentage points more likely to feel this sense of agency than those without access.

2.  Household

At the household level, we see one factor in particular that is critically undermining resilience in many parts of the world, and that is financial resilience. Without it, communities are unable to effectively recover and rebuild.

In the poll, we asked people how long they could cover their basic needs such as food, shelter, and medication, if they lost all their income, for instance, as a result of a climate-related disaster. The results expose the sheer extent of global financial vulnerability, with over a third, 34%, of people unable to cover their needs for more than a month, including 12% who could survive for less than a week.

3.  Community

The figures shown above on financial resilience suggest that overall resilience to climate impacts will inevitably be stronger in high-income countries and regions. To an extent, this is reflected in the country rankings in the World Risk Poll Resilience Index. However, there are countries — particularly lower-middle income countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam — that buck the trend, largely due to high levels of household disaster planning and trust in government.

One particular measure on which low-income countries tend to score better than high-income countries is in the community domain. As a proxy for levels of community support — vital in a crisis when community members are often de facto first responders before emergency services can arrive — we asked people how much they think their neighbors care about them and their well-being. People in low-income countries were significantly more likely, 35%, to say their neighbors care about them “a lot” than people in high-income countries, where the figure was 20%. This is a phenomenon that can, and should, be capitalized on to enhance resilience where official resources are limited — as is being done by female-led initiatives in the informal settlements of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

4.  Society

In this domain, we factor in a question that may at first seem only tangentially related to climate resilience: Have you personally experienced discrimination, for instance, on the basis of ethnicity, sex, or religion? However, such discrimination can undermine resilience by disrupting the social cohesiveness needed to respond effectively and equitably to a crisis. Worldwide, more than one in five people, 21%, said they had experienced discrimination based on at least one of the characteristics asked about. In some countries, around half of respondents said they had experienced some form of discrimination. These include a number of sub-Saharan African states such as Zambia, Cameroon, and Uganda, but Brazil, Bolivia, and the U.S. are also in the top six.

Joining the dots

Separate data within the four different resilience domains is valuable up until a point, but greater insights can be unlocked when we examine the relationships between them.

For example, in a new research paper based on the World Risk Poll data, we can see how, in much of the world, loss of access to critical infrastructure services leads to a greater loss of confidence in the disaster preparedness of local government than national government. That loss of confidence can in turn lead to reductions in people’s sense of personal agency to protect themselves and their families. Such compounding erosions of resilience show how different influencing factors are all interconnected and cannot be addressed in isolation.

The resilience indicators mentioned above are just a subset of those on which the World Risk Poll Resilience Index is built, but provide an illustration of the diversity of factors incorporated. Strategies to improve resilience that do not encompass all these domains — informed by the relevant data — are more likely, at least in part, to fail. Resilience may be improved for some sectors of society, but the most vulnerable may well be left exposed.

Data for the next edition of the poll is being collected in the field as we speak and is due to be published in June 2024. How increasingly frequent climate disasters and global economic crises have affected the resilience of communities across the world remains to be seen.

Explore the resilience index and all its underlying data — freely available for reanalysis — and get in touch with the team via the World Risk Poll website. Funding opportunities are available for organizations that can help turn the data into action, as well as opportunities to help shape future editions of the poll.