Adaptive capacity
The ability of systems, institutions, humans and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities or to respond to consequences (IPCC AR6 WGII glossary).
Compensability
The extent to which a deficit in one indicator can be offset by a surplus in another. Constant under linear aggregation, lower for low values under geometric aggregation.
Composite indicator
A single index compiled from individual indicators on the basis of an underlying model, to measure a multidimensional concept that cannot be captured by one indicator (OECD/JRC Handbook, 2008).
Coping capacity
The ability of people, organizations and systems, using available skills and resources, to manage adverse conditions, risk or disasters (UN, 2016).
Country credit risk
In the OECD Arrangement, the likelihood that a country will service its external debts, covering moratoria, transfer delays, exchange-rate discharge laws, other government measures and force majeure.
Country risk index
A composite measure that scores or classifies countries by their likelihood of suffering a defined type of loss, built from many indicators under a stated framework, normalisation, weighting and aggregation method.
Data provenance
Information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing a piece of data, used to assess its quality, reliability or trustworthiness (W3C PROV).
Disaster loss database
A set of systematically collected records about disaster occurrence, damages, losses and impacts, compliant with the Sendai Framework monitoring minimum requirements (UN, 2016).
Disaster risk
The potential loss of life, injury, or destroyed or damaged assets in a specific period, determined probabilistically as a function of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity (UN, 2016).
Extensive disaster risk
The risk of low-severity, high-frequency hazardous events and disasters, mainly but not exclusively associated with highly localized hazards (UN, 2016).
FAIR principles
Guiding principles that scientific data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable by both humans and machines (Wilkinson et al., 2016).
Ground truthing
Checking modelled or remotely sensed risk information against observations and knowledge from the place itself, such as field surveys, national records or local institutions.
Hazard and Exposure
The INFORM dimension for hazard-dependent factors: natural hazards (earthquake, flood, tsunami, cyclone, drought, epidemic) and human hazards (conflict), aggregated by geometric mean with equal weights.
Lack of adaptive capacities
In the WorldRiskIndex, deficits in long-term processes and strategies that bring anticipatory changes in societal structures and systems to counteract, mitigate or prevent future negative impacts.
Lack of coping capacities
In the WorldRiskIndex, deficits in the abilities and measures of societies to counter adverse impacts of natural events through direct action and available resources, and to reduce damage and start recovery right after an event.
Lack of Coping Capacity
The INFORM dimension for the absence of institutional and infrastructure resources that help a country absorb and recover from a crisis, aggregated by geometric mean of two categories.
Lack of Reliability Index
An INFORM measure on a 0-10 scale of how far a country’s risk score can be trusted, based on missing data, out-of-date data and conflict status.
Min-max normalisation
Rescaling an indicator to a fixed range by subtracting a minimum and dividing by the range; INFORM rescales core indicators to 0-10 this way, with log transformation for very skewed data.
Normalisation
Transforming indicators measured in different units onto a common scale, for example by min-max rescaling, z-scores or ranking, so that they can be combined.
Open licence
Terms that let anyone access, reuse and redistribute data, usually with attribution; for example CC BY 4.0, which permits commercial use with credit.
Risk class
A labelled band on an index scale, such as Very Low to Very High, set by fixed thresholds so that a country’s position can be read without relying on its exact rank.
Risk propeller
The IPCC AR6 depiction of risk as the interaction of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, with ‘wings’ showing how responses modulate each determinant.
Sensitivity analysis
Apportioning the variation in a composite’s output to the individual input assumptions, to show which choices drive the uncertainty most.
Statistical audit
An independent assessment of a composite indicator’s data quality, statistical coherence and robustness, such as the audits run by the JRC Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards.
StormRiskIndex
A 2026 WorldRiskReport index that applies the WorldRiskIndex method to storm exposure; the Philippines scores highest, at 69.27.
Susceptibility
In the WorldRiskIndex, the structural characteristics and general conditions of societies that increase the overall likelihood of populations suffering damage from extreme natural events and entering a state of disaster.
Uncertainty analysis
Propagating the uncertainty in modelling choices, such as weights, normalisation and imputation, through a composite to measure the resulting spread of scores or ranks.
Vulnerability
The conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impacts of hazards (UN, 2016).
Vulnerability (INFORM)
The INFORM dimension for hazard-independent susceptibility, combining socio-economic vulnerability and vulnerable groups through a geometric average.
Winsorisation
An outlier treatment that assigns extreme values the next highest or lowest value in the distribution, so that outliers do not become unintended benchmarks.
WorldRiskIndex
An annual index of disaster risk for 193 countries, computed by IFHV for Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft as the geometric mean of exposure and vulnerability on a 0-100 scale.
WorldRiskReport
The annual report by Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft and IFHV at Ruhr University Bochum that publishes the WorldRiskIndex with a focus topic; storms in 2026.