Quantifying Children’s Exposure to Climate Risks using Unsupervised Learning with Multi-Source Geospatial Datasets

The Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) was first released in 2021, providing a comprehensive, global view of children’s exposure and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The CCRI is a composite index that aims to rank countries where children are exposed to climate and environmental hazards. The CCRI 2.0 builds on the previous index by integrating two pillars; Pillar 1 focusing on climate hazards and Pillar 2 on inherent vulnerabilities to WASH, health, education and other relevant dimensions. 

 

We highlight our contributions to CCRI 2.0, using a cluster methodology for quantifying children’s exposure to climate risks including riverine and coastal flooding, tropical storms, heatwaves, and drought. Using unsupervised learning, we allow for a data-driven approach to provide an interpretation of the ranking of children’s exposure to climate risks on a global scale between countries, as well as at the sub-national and local levels. It complements the previous method of constructing the synthesized index, which involved calculating the simple average of multiple indicators. We further discuss our techniques in tackling the challenges of multisource data processing, analysis, and visualization of geospatial data for user insight.