The Digital Social Vulnerability Index (DSVI) is a cutting-edge digital solution for vulnerability assessments to monitor and understand the exact location, distribution and underlying drivers of social vulnerabilities. While previous vulnerability measures would require conducting timely and costly surveys, the DSVI provides a higher resolution and improved representation of a country’s social vulnerability (SV) beyond administrative boundaries. Moreover, compared with previous instruments, the DSVI is the first tool of its kind to incorporate a much more comprehensive SV analysis by integrating numerous data sources and indices into one.

The DSVI technical whitepaper explains the rationale, benefits, outcomes, methodologies and the relevance of the DSVI. It can be regarded as a technical manual that describes the process of SV calculations with innovative methods, such as geographic information systems (GIS) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The paper critically evaluates the current vulnerability assessment space and proposes various ways for its improvement. Some suggestions include improvements to the calculation process of SV, the datasets, preprocessing of datasets, usage of machine learning to produce high-resolution maps and the implementation of online tools to display the results.

The Digital Social Vulnerability Index Technical Whitepaper is a product of the UNDP International Center for Private Sector in Development’s (ICPSD) SDG AI Lab, supported by the Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (DRT) for Building Resilience Team. The Lab has a mission to harness the potential of frontier technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), ML and GIS for sustainable development.