Climate resilient development: New open source index and indicators

The JRC has designed a global index to support the EU's Global Climate Change Alliance plus (GCCA+) programme in its goal to help the most vulnerable countries to respond to climate change in the period up to 2020. It has been presented today at a dedicated event at COP21, the UN Climate Conference in Paris. The JRC's new open source index facilitates the ex-ante evaluation of the structural features of the vulnerability to climate change of the target countries of the GCCA+. It covers social, economic and environmental aspects of achieving climate-resilient development by aggregating 34 country-level 'fit-for-purpose indicators'. These have been identified on the basis of their relevance for the EU GCCA+ initiative and their compliance with criteria such as reliability, open source, consistency, scientific robustness, global coverage, and publicly available data.

The GCCA+ index can be consulted via the online knowledge platform which acts as an interface between science and policy and provides transparent, reliable, accurate, and open source information on the indicators, data and methodology applied to build the index. It allows users to examine the factors behind the index and the indicators.

This knowledge platform will also support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to ensure their implementation is backed by evidence. It will focus on the link between economic, social and environmental dimensions of the SDGs in order to understand the viability of reaching multiple objectives simultaneously.

Source: European Commission Joint Research Centre