Reassessment of global climate risk: non-compensatory or compensatory?

Evidence shows the global climate will continue to change over this century and beyond. A clear understanding of the climate change risk is suggested to be the foundation of the human adaptation. The plausible climate risk index reported by Germanwatch may be criticized as the fully compensatory assumption among underlying indicators, and the risk performance of each country in absolute terms cannot be assessed as the information on indicator level lost. We formulate an enhanced non-compensatory assessment scheme to reassess country’s risk performance under climate change by means of penalizing underlying indicators that fail to satisfy certain criteria. Based on the new scheme, we can genuinely restrict the compensability among underlying indicators and provide informative decision aiding. A case study is performed to illustrate the effectiveness of our analysis by constructing a new climate risk index for 119 countries in terms of death toll, deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, absolute losses in PPP and losses per GDP unit.