IT was reported recently that, for the third straight year, the Philippines had the dubious honor of topping the list of 193 countries in the 2024 World Risk Index (WRI) Report, an annual ranking produced by the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict of the Ruhr-University Bochum in Denmark. The news should have raised concerns and inspired a serious conversation among the public and policymakers, but it did not, even despite a string of recent damaging storms. It seems that after the WRI results were duly noted by the media, they were forgotten; if they inspired any reaction at all, it was perhaps resignation. There was no metric for "complacency" in the WRI analysis, but perhaps there should have been, because it is the biggest risk of all.
Since it did not seem to be explained well in most news reports, the focus being mainly on the results rather than how they were determined, the WRI "score" for each country, according to the organization conducting it, is determined as the geometric mean of scores for the country's exposure risk to disasters and its vulnerability. Scores are on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores representing higher risk.
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