Index for Risk Management INFORM - Concept and Methodology

This is already the third report of the revised INFORM's concept and methodology. INFORM is a composite indicator that identifies countries at risk of humanitarian crisis and disaster that would overwhelm national response capacity. The INFORM index supports a proactive crisis and disaster management framework. The INFORM initiative began in 2012 as a convergence of interests of UN agencies, donors, NGOs and research institutions to establish a common evidence-base for global humanitarian risk analysis. The INFORM model is based on risk concepts published in scientific Literature and envisages three dimensions of risk: Hazards & Exposure, Vulnerability and Lack of Coping Capacity. The INFORM model is split into different Levels to provide a quick overview of the underlying factors leading to humanitarian risk and builds up the picture of risk by 53 core indicators. The INFORM 2016 was mainly changed to incorporate new disaster risk data published by GAR 2015. We introduced the new risk metric in most of natural hazards and improved the way the conflict risk is measured as well as changed data source for the road density indicator. We also introduced five classes of risk with fixed thresholds using hierarchical cluster technique .These changes have been applied also at dimension and category Level and will help us to track risk better. Any changes in the INFORM methodology are always applied at Least five previous years of data to preserve the consistency for the trend analysis.