JRC statistical audit of the INFORM Risk index

The main aim of INFORM Risk is to provide information on the risk of countries to humanitarian crises caused by hazards and people's exposure to them including all main type of natural and human hazards, vulnerability and resources available to help people cope. The Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) was invited by the developers to audit the index. The aim of the audit is to help ensure the transparency of the methodology and the reliability of its results by focusing on data quality, the statistical soundness of the multi-level structure, and the impact of key modelling assumptions. The INFORM risk index provides information on the risks of humanitarian crises and disasters on country level across the globe. This year, the 2024 version of the index is composed by 74 indicators and covers 191 countries across the world. JRC-COIN concludes the INFORM Risk index is an adequate representation of most of the underlying data by examining the structural coherence of correlations and Principle Component Analysis. The JRC-COIN team has identified some areas for further improvement that the developers could consider such as the statistical coherence of certain aggregates in the index. The JRC-COIN team suggests some small changes which developers could test to improve the statistical coherence. Lastly, the analysis shows that the scores and risk categories reliably reflect a wide range of scenarios and are robust to certain methodological alterations, including the imputation method, aggregation formulas and weighting.