German Foreign Office leverages Verisk Maplecroft data to launch new Climate & Conflict platform

London, November 7^th, 2022: Working with the support of Verisk Maplecroft, the German Federal Foreign Office has launched the 'Climate & Conflict' platform. The interactive online resource has been specifically designed to help analysts and policymakers better understand the often-overlooked connection between violent conflict, climate change, and socio-economic fragility.

The platform utilises Verisk Maplecroft’s geospatial, subnational climate data, alongside data provided by the World Bank, ACLED and other publicly available resources, to generate global risk scores calculated on a one-degree latitude-longitude grid. Users can utilise an interactive map to take a deeper dive into a selected set of ‘hotspot’ regions, accessing risk scores based on three layers of data covering climate, socio-economic ‘scope conditions’, and conflict. These dimensions are comprised of several underlying indicators, including:

• Climate: Natural disasters, climate extremes, climate variability, long-term climate change measures
• Scope conditions: Social tensions, state fragility, climate change vulnerability
• Conflict: Conflict intensity, civil unrest

“While the first-order impacts of climate change, such as floods, extreme heat and drought are becoming increasingly well understood, the same cannot be said for the indirect effects, including the interconnection between the climate crisis and violent conflict,” says James Allan, Head of Corporate Risk and Sustainability at Verisk Maplecroft. “The Conflict & Climate platform provides analysts and policymakers with the vital information they need to unpack these complex issues and ultimately make better informed decisions.”

The platform will undergo consistent development and improvement, including further dynamic, data-driven hotspot detection, to ensure the analysis remains timely and relevant in what is a rapidly changing risk environment.