Climate Exploitation Risk Index
The Climate Exploitation Risk Index (CERI) is designed to systematically capture how climate-related disruptions interact with social and economic vulnerabilities to increase the risk of exploitation and trafficking. Conceptually, CERI adapts the disaster risk assessment framework of the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030), extending it beyond first-order disaster impacts to account for second-order social harms that emerge in the aftermath of climate stress.
CERI assesses risk through three interrelated dimensions: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, which together determine the level of climate-driven exploitation risk in a given geography.
Hazard captures the frequency and intensity of climate-related events such as floods, cyclones, droughts, heatwaves, and other extreme weather phenomena. These hazards are treated as location-specific characteristics and are aggregated into a composite hazard index that reflects the cumulative climate stress experienced by a given area.
Exposure measures the extent to which people, livelihoods, and assets are situated within hazard-prone areas. In the CERI framework, exposure reflects the presence and size of different social groups within climate-stressed locations, recognising that risk emerges not only from hazards themselves, but from who and what is exposed to them.
Vulnerability represents the underlying social, economic, and governance conditions that shape how severely climate stress translates into exploitation risk. This includes factors such as poverty, informality of work, migration dependence, gender inequality, marginalisation, and weak institutional presence. Vulnerability is conceptualised at the community level, reflecting structural conditions that persist across space and time.
