The annually published Climate Risk Index compares weather-related loss events (storms, floods, heatwaves, etc.) and their impacts on the world's nations.
The Climate Risk Index (CRI), first published in 2006, is one of the longest-standing indices that appear annually and measure climate impacts. The Climate Risk Index (CRI) examines how severely climate-related extreme weather events affect different countries, measuring the consequences that these events have had for the countries concerned.
The index retrospectively ranks countries according to their economic and human impacts (fatalities as well as people affected, injured, and made homeless). The most severely affected country is placed first.
The CRI illustrates the scale of the impacts of such events for the two years prior to publication and over the preceding 30-year period. The index puts international climate policy debates and processes into a broader context and draws attention to the climate risks that countries face. It simplifies the aggregation of the consequences of extreme weather events across different regions and time periods, enabling new insights. The most severely affected countries at the top of the list should take the CRI results as a warning. They face the threat of frequent events, or rare but all the more extreme ones.
CRI Rankings and Key Findings in 2025
Scorching heat, heavy rainfall, devastating wildfires, deadly floods, and destructive storms: these types of extreme weather events have become a new normal worldwide. The new edition of the Climate Risk Index 2025 brings to light the rising costs of inaction. The CRI highlights the ever-increasing human and economic toll.
From 1993 to 2022, more than 765,000 people died in over 9,400 extreme weather events. The directly caused economic losses amounted to almost US$4.2 trillion (inflation-adjusted). The figures show that the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters continues to increase, making climate protection measures urgently necessary.
You can find the full report as well as summaries in several languages at germanwatch.org.
