ClimVAT — Climate Vulnerability Assessment Tool
Climate Vulnerability,
five kilometres
at a time.
ClimVAT shows where climate risk is highest for the crops people grow, combining climate hazards with exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity at 5 km resolution across five African countries.
A season is not an average.
A farmer does not experience a mean temperature. They experience the day the rains arrive, the run of dry days in the middle of the season, the afternoon the heat passes what the crop can tolerate, and the storm that takes the topsoil.
ClimVAT measures those events, not the averages that hide them — and it measures them where the crop actually grows, inside a mask of real cropland rather than across a whole district.
That is why the unit above is one cell of about 5 km, and why the map has holes in it. Where there is no maize, there is no reading. Where there is water, there is no reading. The tool would rather say nothing than average a lake into a harvest.
Fourteen ways a season can go wrong.
Each is computed from daily climate data for every cell, for every decade from 1980 to 2050, under three scenarios. These are the raw material; nothing here is an opinion. Open any of them to see what it measures.
Four models, averaged.
No climate model is right. Each carries its own assumptions about clouds, oceans and land, and each disagrees with the others in specific, known ways.
ClimVAT uses four from the NASA-NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 archive, bias-corrected and downscaled, and reports their ensemble mean. Where they agree, you can lean on the number. Where they disagree, the spread is part of the finding.
The “VAT” in ClimVAT.
ClimVAT is short for the Climate Vulnerability Assessment Tool. A place is not at risk simply because the weather is bad there — it is at risk when hazard meets a farming system that feels it and cannot recover.
Every cell above is scored on that basis: how hard the hazards hit, how much the system feels them, and what is there to cope. The full framework — each ingredient mapped on its own, region by region — lives on the vulnerability page.
Five countries, and the crops that feed them.
Climate intelligence for Africa’s food systems.
Every surface in the tool is built from the same grid, the same crop masks and the same four models, so a reading in Ghana means what a reading in Zambia means.