Germanwatch

The Relative Consequences Also Depend on Economic and Population Growth

Identifying relative values in this index represents an important complement to the otherwise often dominating absolute values because it allows for analysing country specific data on damages in relation to real conditions and capacities in those countries. It is obvious, for example, that for richer countries like the USA or Japan damages of one billion US$ cause much less economic consequences than for the world’s poorest countries, where damages in many cases constitute a substantial share of the annual GDP. This is being backed up by the relative analysis.

It should be noted that values, and hence the rankings of countries regarding the respective indicators do not only change due to the absolute impacts of extreme weather events, but also due to economic and population growth or decline. If, for example, population increases, which is the case in most of the countries, the same absolute number of deaths leads to a relatively lower assessment in the following year. The same applies to economic growth. However, this does not affect the significance of the relative approach. Society’s ability of coping with damages through precaution, mitigation and disaster preparedness, insurances or the improved availability of means for emergency aid, generally grows along with increasing economic strength. Nevertheless, an improved ability does not necessarily imply enhanced implementation of effective preparation and response measures. While absolute numbers tend to overestimate populous or economically capable countries, relative values give more prominence to smaller and poorer countries. In order to consider both effects, the analysis of the CRI is based on absolute (indicators 1 and 3) as well as on relative (indicators 2 and 4) scores. Being double weighted in the average ranking of all indicators generating the CRI Score, more emphasis and therefore higher importance is given to the relative losses.