Humanitarian organizations rarely suffer from a shortage of information about crises. What they lack is a way to place crises side by side on a single comparable scale. A country team knows its own operating environment well. What is harder to establish, and what funders and headquarters routinely ask for, is how that environment compares with twenty others competing for the same constrained budget.
The ARAC INFORM Severity Dashboard exists to make that comparison straightforward. It presents the ACAPS INFORM Severity Index in an interactive form: a global map of crisis severity, a browsable record for each country, the methodology behind the scoring, and a data status view showing how current the underlying figures are. Records can be filtered by severity category and by the reliability rating attached to each assessment, so a user can see not only what the data says but how much weight it will carry.
That last point matters more than it may appear. An analyst who presents a severity figure to a board or a donor will be asked where it came from and how confident anyone is in it. The dashboard is built so that question has an answer on the same screen as the number.
The INFORM Severity Index places each crisis in one of five categories, from very low to very high, on an underlying indicator scale of 0 to 10 in which higher values indicate greater severity.
ACAPS is an independent provider of humanitarian analysis. It implements the INFORM Severity Index in collaboration with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which leads on methodology development. The index is not a proprietary product of any single agency, and it is published openly, which is why it can serve as shared ground between organizations that otherwise have no common measure.
The index is a composite measure. Rather than reducing a crisis to a single reported figure such as casualty counts or displacement totals, it aggregates indicators across three dimensions:
The direct consequences of the event or situation, including its geographic reach, the people affected, and the damage to systems and infrastructure they rely on.
The state people are actually living in: access to food, water, shelter, health services, education, and protection. This dimension carries the greatest weight in the overall score.
The factors that make a crisis harder to resolve or to operate within, including access constraints, the number of actors involved, and the operating environment for assistance.
| Producer | ACAPS, with methodology developed in collaboration with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. |
|---|---|
| Update cycle | Updated monthly, which allows deterioration and improvement to be tracked over time rather than assessed once. |
| Inclusion threshold | A situation is tracked as a crisis when it affects at least 30,000 people or one percent of the population, or when at least 10,000 people are assessed as needing assistance. |
| Institutional use | The index informs allocation and categorisation decisions at DG ECHO, at the UN OCHA Central Emergency Response Fund, and within the IFRC crisis categorisation process. |
| Supporting sources | The dashboard draws on ACAPS INFORM Severity data alongside ACLED conflict event data and Natural Earth administrative boundaries for mapping. |
Programme and response teams use comparable severity scoring to support prioritisation between locations, to build the evidence base for a funding proposal, and to show a board or donor why a particular setting warrants attention now. Because the index is updated monthly, it also supports the harder argument: that a situation is deteriorating and should be addressed before it becomes an emergency response.
A consistent, openly published, monthly time series across crises is unusual and analytically valuable. It supports comparative study of how crises develop, testing of early warning indicators against observed severity, and analysis that can be reproduced and checked by others. The reliability ratings carried alongside each record allow weaker data to be identified rather than quietly averaged in.
Severity and complexity scoring gives security focal points a defensible external reference for the operating environment their people work in. It supports duty of care documentation, informs travel and deployment decisions, and provides a starting point for risk assessment in settings where an organization has no established presence. For a small organization without a dedicated safety function, an open and methodologically transparent source is often the only credible baseline available.
Allocation decisions are easier to defend when they rest on a measure that applies the same standard to every case and whose method is published. The same figures used by major institutional donors are available here without a subscription or an account.
This application was designed and developed by M. Nuri Shakoor, SRMP-R, through MNS Consulting and Quanta Analytica, in support of ARAC International Inc. and the Global Development and Risk Management Division of Lladner Business Solutions, LLC.
It is provided as a public good. ARAC International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and this dashboard is published without charge, without registration, and without any commercial interest in the data it presents. The underlying index remains the work of ACAPS and its methodological partners, and is presented here with attribution rather than reinterpretation.
This tool supports two ARAC programme areas directly. See Safety & Security Risk Management for how severity data feeds risk assessment and duty of care work, and Humanitarian Support for technical support to organizations operating in these settings.
Our Research & Analysis programme produces country and regional assessments that draw on sources of this kind. Every judgement we publish carries its evidence and a stated confidence level, so that readers can check the reasoning rather than take it on trust.
ARAC International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions fund tools like this one, technical support to humanitarian partners, and education programmes advancing human rights worldwide.