- Updated June 16, 2023
This project is based on a dataset of 177 UN Member States and their annual levels of climate change sensitivity, access to electricity, and insecurity from 2010-2020. Descriptions of each of these three datapoints are below:
- Climate Change Sensitivity: The extent to which a country is sensitive to the negative effects of climate change. Scored from 0 to 1, with higher values reflecting greater sensitivity.
- Access to Electricity: The percentage of a country’s population with access to electricity. Scored from 0 to 100%, with higher values reflecting greater access. In some cases (e.g., on the case country webpages), this datapoint is also divided among the urban and rural populations.
- Insecurity: The level of security threats a country faces. Scores from 0 to 10, with higher values reflecting greater threats.
Due to limited data availability, not all UN Member States are reflected in the data. The 177 UN Member States that are included in the dataset are those for which 2010-2020 data are available from each of the project’s three data sources.
Data Sources
The project’s climate change sensitivity data are based on the Notre Dame Global Adaption Initiative (ND-GAIN) Country Index. The ND-GAIN Country Index measures, among other things, a country’s vulnerability to the negative effects of climate change.
This project relies on an adapted version of the ND-GAIN vulnerability scores to determine a country’s climate change sensitivity. While the original ND-GAIN vulnerability scores are based on three types of indicators (climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity), this project focuses only on two (climate exposure and sensitivity). The third set of indicators (adaptive capacity) include electricity access, as well as other indicators closely correlated with electricity access (e.g., paved roads and dam capacity). Since the project already accounts for electricity access using data from the World Bank, the project team chose to exclude ND-GAIN’s adaptive capacity indicators from its assessment of climate change sensitivity to avoid double-counting. This adjustment was made by calculating the average of ND-GAIN’s exposure and sensitivity scores.
The ND-GAIN Country Index only includes information for South Sudan as part of its information for Sudan. As such, this project uses the combined climate change data for Sudan and South Sudan presented for each individual country.
The project’s electricity-access data are drawn from the World Bank Global Electrification Database. The database is developed using data from several different sources, including nationally representative household surveys (such as national censuses).
The project’s insecurity data are based on the Fund for Peace’s Fragile State Index. In particular, the project uses the Index’s Security Apparatus scores, which consider “the security threats to a state, such as bombings, attacks and battle-related deaths, rebel movements, mutinies, coups, or terrorism” and “serious criminal factors,” among other things.
Powering Peace Index Score Methodology
The Powering Peace Index Score reflects the combined level of severity each country faces under all three dimensions (i.e., climate sensitivity, access to electricity, and insecurity) in a given year or range of years.
The process for calculating the Index Score is as follows:
- To facilitate comparisons, the climate sensitivity, access to electricity, and insecurity data are adjusted by converting them to scored values from 0 to 100.
- Lower values reflect better outcomes (e.g., low levels of insecurity) and higher values reflect worse outcomes (e.g., high levels of insecurity).
- Rather than each extreme (i.e., 0 and 100) reflecting the theoretical best and worse outcomes, they are instead linked to the actual best and worst outcomes observed in our sample of 177 counties between 2010-2020. For example, in the Fragile States Index’s Security Apparatus data (which is the basis for our insecurity data), there was not a single country that received a perfect score of 0 out of 10 between 2010-2020, which would indicate absolute security. The lowest actual score was 0.7. Countries that received this insecurity score in given year would, for that year, have an adjusted insecurity score of 0 out of 100. This would indicate not that they had perfect security, but that they were among the most secure countries between 2010-2020. At the other end, there were instances of complete insecurity with actual states at 10 so their score was adjusted directly to 100.
- The adjusted scores are calculated from the raw data (one for climate sensitivity, one for access to electricity, and one for insecurity) for each of the 177 countries in our dataset for each year from 2010-2020.
- The formula for calculating these adjusted scores is below:
- These three values are then averaged (i.e., added together and divided by three) to calculate the Powering Peace Index Score.
- In some cases (e.g., in charts showing changes from year to year) we have calculated annual Index Scores. To do this, we averaged a country’s adjusted climate sensitivity, access to electricity, and insecurity scores for a given year.
- In other cases (e.g., in charts showing which countries are currently most severely impacted) we have calculated Index Scores using a three-year average. To do this, we calculated a country’s Index Score for the most recent three years in our dataset (2018, 2019, and 2020) and divided the total by three.
While there is potential for either further refinement of the data or alternative methodologies, we see this data collection, aggregation and analysis as providing a valuable insight into the connection among these crucial factors. Other analysts and policymakers should take into account the totality of these factors in weighing possible policy and programmatic priorities.