Which countries are most prepared for climate change?
Did you know there's a running database that keeps track of all this?
Which countries are most prepared for climate change? It really depends on what metric you use. However, the folks over at the University of Notre Dame have come up with a clever way of figuring it out. According to them, the countries most prepared for climate change are the ones with fewer vulnerabilities and higher degree of readiness.
Countries most prepared for climate change based on vulnerabilities
Every country has vulnerabilities, but some have less than others. As part of the Notre Dame, Global Adaptation Initiative Index (ND-GAIN), they took at look at six core vulnerabilities to rank each country:
Food
Water
Health
Ecosystem services
Human habitat
Infrastructure
Some of these are pretty self-explanatory. A country ranks better in “food” if it has access to land it can plant crops on, and has enough of that land to feed its own people. It gets a little more nuanced than that, but more or less it’s pretty easy to understand.
Others are little less clear. Take the ecosystem services metric, for example. This metric weighs whether a country has a diverse enough marine system, or whether a country is dependent on its natural capital or not. Natural capital basically meaning whether it can depend on its own natural resources for basic needs.
Countries most prepared for climate change based on readiness
Readiness, on the other hand, measures the sort of qualities in a country that are determined by the people within it. This would be things like how well the government operated, or how educated the population is. Here are the readiness indicators:
Economic
Governance
Social readiness
One particular measure, again is the political stability index under the governance indicator. Again, looking at the United States, the U.S. ranks fairly high up until after 9/11/2001 when it takes a noticeable hit due to the war on terror. Another noticeable hit comes with the presidency of Donald Trump, which very infamously eschewed political norms to create a much more chaotic government.
How each country ranks today
The ND-GAIN is updated every couple years, so things are constantly changing based on the above metrics. However, certain countries are definitely consistently performing at the top and others consistently perform at the bottom. This makes sense when you factor in the economic weight of some countries. Europe, the United States, Canada, etc. all perform fairly well overall through the years. Likewise, countries in Africa, South America, and southeast Asia struggle a bit more. To compensate for this the ND-GAIN allows for you to adjust by GDP. When you do this, the United States goes from 19th, as shown in the map above, to 70th.
This shakes up my map above quite a bit. Here are the 20 most and least prepared countries for climate change when factoring in GDP:
Most prepared:
New Zealand
Georgia
Finland
Belarus
Chile
Barbados
Dominica
Armenia
Grenada
Japan
South Korea
United Kingdom
Kyrgystan
Sweden
Slovenia
Australia
Morocco
Russia
Estonia
Saint Lucia
Least prepared:
Qatar
Luxembourg
Chad
Central African Republic
Ireland
Eritrea
Singapore
Sudan
Guinea-Bissau
Equatorial Guinea
Congo
Niger
Bahrain
Afghanistan
Brunei
United Arab Emirates
Venezuela
Liberia
Zimbabwe
Bahamas
Some make sense. New Zealand, for example. Others make less sense when in this context, however. I’m not sure if GDP matters much when looking at Ireland (which ranks 5th from the bottom). That said, accounting for GDP does make the data at least a little more interesting.
All said, who can say which country is most prepared for climate change, really? We’re still figuring out exactly what climate change will do, let alone how we can prepare for it. Ultimately, I’m not sure any country is really all that prepared for it.