To What Extent Are African Countries Made Vulnerable to Climate Change?: Lessons from a New Indicator of Physical Vulnerability to Climate Change

This paper examines the vulnerability of African countries to climate change, they are not responsible for. It relies on an index of structural or physical vulnerability to climate change at the country level, noted below by the acronym PVCCI, recently set up by the authors and made available on the Ferdi website. The design of this index draws both on the environmental literature and some principles applied at the United Nations to measure the structural economic vulnerability through the Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) for the identification of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). As an environmental index, the PVCCI index relies on components reflecting only physical consequences of climate change that can directly affect population welfare and activity, rather than on an assessment of their economic consequences. At the same time this index of vulnerability to climate change refers only to the vulnerability that does not depend on the present will of the African countries. In other words this index refers to a “structural” or “physical” vulnerability, keeping aside resilience, usually integrated in vulnerability assessments, but largely depending on policy factors. The components of the index respectively capture two kinds of risks related to climate change: the risks of increasing recurrent shocks (such as droughts) and the risks of progressive and irreversible shocks (such as flooding due to higher sea level). Moreover the components refer either to the likely size of the shocks or to the country exposure to these shocks.