How to read the RCVI
The RCVI in five points
- A settlement-level index of climate and conflict risk for refugee settlements: 445 settlements in five pilot countries.
- It combines four things: the hazards at a location, how many people are there, how susceptible they are, and what capacity they have to cope.
- Scores are relative. A high score means higher risk than other scored settlements, not that a fixed danger threshold has been crossed.
- It describes recent conditions (hazards over roughly the past 12 months). It is not a forecast or a climate projection.
- It is a screening and prioritisation aid. It supports, and does not replace, field knowledge and operational assessment.
What it measures
| Pillar | The question it answers | Effect on score |
|---|---|---|
| Hazard | What climate extremes and conflict has this location experienced recently? | Raises it |
| Exposure | How many people are there to be affected? | Raises it |
| Sensitivity | How susceptible is the population already (age, food insecurity, poverty, social protection)? | Raises it |
| Adaptive capacity | What services, infrastructure and rights help people cope? | Lowers it |
RCVI = (Hazard × Exposure × Sensitivity) ÷ Adaptive capacity
The pillars are multiplied, not added. A settlement scores high only when hazard, exposure and sensitivity are all present together.
Score or band?
Score (0–10) and rank
Position among scored settlements in the same country. 10 means the highest-risk settlement in that country, not maximum possible risk. A score of 8 in Kenya and 8 in Chad are not equivalent. Use rank and broad groupings, not small differences.
Band
Where a settlement sits across all five countries, in quarters of the pooled scored settlements. Very High means the highest quarter, not an absolute level of severity. This is the only way to compare across countries.
Reading a settlement card
- Pillar bars (0–1) show why a settlement scores as it does. For Hazard, Exposure and Sensitivity higher is worse. For Adaptive capacity higher is better. Two settlements with the same score can have very different profiles, pointing to different responses.
- Vulnerability is the average of Sensitivity and the lack of Adaptive capacity. It sets hazard and population size aside and shows how badly people would be affected if a shock occurred.
- Data confidence: “Complete” means all domains are present. An evidence warning means a domain rests on few indicators, so read that pillar with caution. Local evidence is the share of Sensitivity and Adaptive-capacity domains measured at the settlement itself (the maximum is 27%). Most of those two pillars describe the district, region or country.
- Fallback score: when a domain is missing the index does not guess. The settlement gets a labelled fallback score from the available domains. Treat it as indicative and do not compare it with primary scores from another country.
Please keep in mind
- Bands are not a statement of operational need. Settlement definitions differ between operations.
- “Insufficient data” is not “low risk.” It means a required piece of data is missing.
- Bands partly reflect settlement size. The pooled score is strongly related to Exposure, so large camps tend to fall in higher bands than small sites facing similar conditions. Read the band together with the pillars.
- Bands are coarse. Plausible changes to the weights move about 13% of settlements into a neighbouring band, so treat settlements near a boundary as uncertain.
- Scores can move between releases, because they are re-scaled within each country when the data are refreshed.
- Most vulnerability data are not measured at the settlement. Only three of the eleven Sensitivity and Adaptive-capacity domains are, so differences between settlements in a country are driven mainly by Hazard, Exposure and those three.
Full detail is in the RCVI User Guidance Note and its companion methodology notes.
Scores (0–10) and ranks are within-country. Bands compare settlements across the five pilot countries; settlement definitions differ between operations, so bands are not a like-for-like statement about operational need. “Insufficient data” means a required domain is missing, not that risk is low.