Countries in South-East Europe (SEE) have a history of devastating earthquakes, floods, landslides, drought, extreme temperature, wildfires, and windstorms that cause major economic and human losses that overwhelm current management capacities. The level of preparedness and prevention also varies from country to country and within countries (regions, municipalities). Because of this high vulnerability and the relatively small size of administrative units within a country, it is crucial to assess the risk of each administrative
unit through reliable and standardized data and statistics to inform Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policy. The INFORM Subnational Risk Index SEE aims to bridge the data gap in reporting and help identify the main risk factors at the local level, which can assist in managing risk. As the development of INFORM is collaborative and the results are open, it is particularly useful in supporting any decision-making process that involves a wide range of actors, such as humanitarian, development, or government planning.
Direct economic losses from disasters have increased tremendously in the last decades, with losses disproportionately borne by vulnerable developing countries. On the other side, disaster risk is increasingly systemic. If we want to reduce risk then we also must be increasingly joined up in our approaches: working across sectors, between and within institutions, and ensuring harmony from policy through to activity. Therefore, the SFDRR and the SDGs share many common indicators (Figure 16), as SFDRR monitoring is intended to complement the monitoring of those SDG indicators.
SFDRR and SDGs common reporting interlinkages
Understanding disaster risk is a complex process that requires a multidisciplinary approach. The INFORM Risk Index is a composite indicator developed by the EU Joint Research Centre as a tool for understanding the risk of humanitarian crisis and disasters. Consisting of three dimensions (Hazard, Vulnerability, and Coping Capacity), the INFORM Subnational Index is the first open source, continuously updated, transparent and reliable tool for understanding crises and disasters at subnational level within a country/region24.
24 Read more on INFORM Risk Subnational at the web site of the European Commission Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre.
The UNDRR Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia in partnership with the Disaster Preparedness and Prevention Initiative for South-Eastern Europe has developed an SEE INFORM subnational risk index25 for Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Romania. This index establishes a baseline view of disaster risk, its drivers, and coping capacity. The SEE INFORM model brings local administrations, governments, international organizations, donors, and humanitarian workers together to work closely towards a better understanding
of disaster risk at local level.
25 Read more on SEE INFORM at the web site of the European Commission Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre.
INFORM Subnational Risk Index SEE 2021, DRR component, contribution to Institutional
risk, by administrative unit in Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia
Target E of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) and target 11.b of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) both aim to quantify the quality of public policy, specifically disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies, to track improvement over time. The SFDRR and the SDGs provide a set of reliable, consistent and comparable indicators required to understand the disaster risk drivers and underlying risk factors. Particularly, SDG target 11b (SFDRR Target E1 and E2), is used to access the Institutional capacity risk within
INFORM Subnational Index for SEE. DRR, Governance and Humanitarian component assemble the institutional risk.
The data on DRR is based on SFDRR E1, which measures at 5.0 per cent in Albania and 25.0 per cent in Montenegro. The values for SFDRR target E2 are 1.64 per cent for Albania and 4.76 per cent for Montenegro. The data for Albania is from 2018 and for Montenegro from 2021 as shared by the Sendai Framework focal point. For North Macedonia, these data are not available. The reported percentages are transformed on the INFORM scale from 0 to 10 where 0 means no risk.
The regions in Albania face very high DRR risk due to lack of national and local DRR Strategies, while Montenegro face low risk considering the advancement in the implementation of its National and municipal DRR Strategy, in comparison with the other countries represented in the INFORM SEE model. At the same time, regions in Albania have less institutional coping capacity, due to increased risk in all of the components (Governance, DRR and Humanitarian), ranging from 7.3 in Gjirokaster to 8.7 in Tirana, ranking the regions
in the high risk institutional capacity zone of the INFORM. The regions in North Macedonia are low risk of institutional capacity considering the low risk in all the components, while low risk across municipalities in Montenegro is a result of low risk in the governance and DRR component, although some municipalities face medium risk due to high humanitarian risk.
Despite the usefulness of the DRR component in compiling INFORM, many challenges persist at (sub)national level. Many of the challenges are related to enforcement of the national/subnational DRR Strategies, but also to their implementation and reporting commitments. Weak national coverage, poor data quality and lack of time series hampers the efforts to include more indices under the INFORM initiative. However, the INFORM SEE initiative coincided with the policy process of development of DRR Strategies (in the case of North Macedonia and Albania at national, and Montenegro at local level), which will surely translate to better reporting and elimination of data gaps, contributing to better risk assessment (especially the coping capacity).
UN, WB, International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, South Eastern Europe Disaster Risk Mitigation and Adaptation Initiative – Risk Assessment for South Eastern Europe, Desk Study Review, 2006 UNDRR, INFORM SEE 2021 results
EU Joint Research Centre, INFORM Index for Risk Management Concept and Methodology Version 2017, 2017
UN Country Office North Macedonia, Open-source INFORM Index Provides Overview of Disaster Risk in North Macedonia, 2021
EU Joint Research Centre, Review of the Sendai Framework Monitor and Sustainable Development Goals indicators for their inclusion into INFORM Global Risk Index, 2019
Ministry of Internal Affairs Montenegro, Akcioni Plan za Sprovođenje strategije smanjenja rizika od katastrofa za period 2022/2023. godine, 2022
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
Palais des Nations, Geneva
