Indices assessing country-level climate and disaster risk at the global scale have experienced a steep rise in popularity both in science and international climate policy. A number of widely cited products have been developed and published over the recent years, argued to contribute critical knowledge for prioritizing action and funding. However, it remains unclear how their results compare, and how consistent their findings are on country-level risk, exposure, vulnerability and lack of coping, as well as adaptive capacity. This paper analyses and compares the design, data, and results of four of the leading global climate and disaster risk indices: The World Risk Index, the INFORM Risk Index, ND-GAIN Index, and the Climate Risk Index. Our analysis clearly shows that there is considerable degree of cross-index variation regarding countries’ risk levels and comparative ranks. At the same time, there is above-average agreement for high-risk countries. In terms of risk sub-components, there is surprisingly little agreement in the results on hazard exposure, while strong inter-index correlations can be observed when ranking countries according to their socio-economic vulnerability and lack of coping as well as adaptive capacity. Vulnerability and capacity hotspots can hence be identified more robustly than risk and exposure hotspots. Our findings speak both to the potential as well as limitations of index-based approaches. They show that a solid understanding of index-based assessment tools, and their conceptual and methodological underpinnings, is necessary to navigate them properly and interpret as well as use their results in triangulation.

The most vulnerable countries often face a double burden in relation to climate change—they are at high risk to the impacts and are least equipped to cope and adapt. Global climate policy since the Convention in 1992, until most recently with the global goal on adaptation in the Paris Agreement, has manifested the importance of prioritizing adaptation support to the most vulnerable countries. The main objective of this study is to understand the enabling and constraining factors that play a role in the process of allocating and accessing global adaptation assistance. We adopted a mixed-methods approach combining two major streams of analysis. First, this paper aims to track bilateral adaptation finance to all so-called developing countries, as bilateral support has been the largest share of international adaptation finance. Second, the paper draws on semi-structured expert interviews and looks at the country level to identify the factors beyond vulnerability that play a role in the distribution of adaptation finance from a recipient’s and a donor’s perspective, using India and Germany as examples. The analysis yields three main findings. First, countries’ vulnerability as measured by standard metrics does not seem to be the prime factor explaining the distribution of available bilateral adaptation assistance. This is in contrast to the political narrative in the emerging climate finance architecture. Second, interview data identified other factors beyond vulnerability that play a role from a donor perspective, such as the perceived capacity to manage and implement projects, the commitment given to climate change and other political priorities. Third, from a recipient perspective, rather than its vulnerability level in a global comparison, strong institutional capacity played a prominent role in attracting adaptation finance. Looking out into the future, the findings underscore the practical and political challenges in relation to a vulnerability-oriented prioritization of funding and they point towards the need to increase countries’ capacities to attract and manage international adaptation support. The findings also raise questions on how to overcome the vexing conflict in the emerging adaptation finance architecture between accommodating for donors’ requirements of high fiduciary standards and enabling access by the most vulnerable countries, which are often short of resources and institutional capacities.

Adapting to climate change impacts requires a coherent social contract in which different actors agree on a clear distribution of roles and responsibilities. An urgent requirement is to understand the imagined social contracts on expected roles and responsibilities, which is particularly relevant in cities where very diverse social groups come together. However, there is limited empirical evidence on these expectations as they are often tacit and hard to capture across large populations and heterogeneous groups. Here we assess the social contract on flood risk management in Mumbai, using the concept of social listening in combination with Twitter data. We find wide gaps between and within imagined social contracts. Sentiments such as frustration and apathy expressed in tweets explain these gaps and highlight the need to build trust for achieving accepted and effective social contracts for adaptation. Theoretical, empirical, and methodological lessons can be transferred to other cities and beyond.

Adaptation efforts need to be advanced significantly, involving multiple actors and a diverse portfolio of options. Despite this being well established, there is little understanding of different actors’ perceptions of adaptation goals and their associated expectations regarding roles and responsibilities to achieve them. In this analysis, we seek to address this gap by elucidating the diverging viewpoints held by various actor groups concerning adaptation objectives, target beneficiaries, and the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation. Here, we use the case study of flood risk in Mumbai, drawing upon qualitative interview data collected through key informant interviews with diverse stakeholders including state, civil society, and academic actors. Interviews revealed stark disparities between state and non-state actors, in particular on the objective of efficiency, largely emphasized by state actors for physical infrastructure measures. Other contested objectives included ecosystem protection and fairness for vulnerable populations. The findings showed consensus on the importance of planning. Non-state actors heavily debated the lack of planning and implementation of institutional changes and ecosystem-based measures. They called for a stronger role of the state in caretaking and fairness for vulnerable populations, mainly through deeper institutional changes. Overall, the findings point to the urgent need for understanding how actors navigate competing priorities, make trade-offs, and negotiate conflicting viewpoints on the distribution of roles and responsibilities. This paper makes an empirical and conceptual contribution to the debates on “social contracts” for adaptation, offering an operationalization of the concept and application to a real-world example through an actor lens.