One in five people are now counted as high climate risk, with a new global metric

The World Bank has introduced a new way to measure climate risk, finding that 4.5 billion people are highly vulnerable to droughts, floods, heatwaves, and cyclones. This new metric combines local hazard exposure with household-level data on income, education, and access to basic services, showing that one in five people globally are at high risk.

This new measurement means development banks and national governments can no longer just look at climate exposure; they must also account for a population's ability to recover. Climate risk assessments often focused on physical hazards. This paper forces a combined view of hazard and human vulnerability, making it harder to ignore the social and economic factors that determine who survives and recovers.