- What it rates. The risk conservation capital runs in each African country, and what would block it first.
- Why the hardest instrument. Every country is scored against a conservation debt-for-nature swap. Rate against the hardest ask and the read carries down, so the score still holds for a grant or a carbon project that will never go near a swap.
- Coverage. All 54 African countries on a 1 to 5 readiness scale, led by the fiscal call, with gates for active conflict and sovereign distress.
- How to read it. A high score is not a green light and a low one is not a wall. It tells you what to structure around.
- Country risk is not site risk. Open any country below to see its protected areas rated on environmental hazard against the country score.
Five weighted slices, then two gates
- The weights. Fiscal capacity 0.30, the deal environment and the conservation asset 0.20 each, delivery and traction 0.15 each, renormalized over whichever slices carry data.
- Why fiscal leads. The binding constraint is almost always whether the sovereign can carry what is being proposed.
- Two gates cap the call. Active armed conflict, and sovereign distress. Either one caps it whatever the number says.
- Governance is context, not a slice. That is what stops the score echoing the World Bank governance index.
- One model on two scales. The country rankings publish this same score times 20, so they run 20 to 100 rather than 0 to 100. It is not a second composite.
Honest limits
- C-RISK scores the national context, so it does not capture how conditions differ between one landscape and another inside the same country.
- Several dimensions rest on editorial judgement rather than hard data. Each one is flagged as such.
- Re-drafting the same country blind reproduces its dimension scores exactly 63.9 percent of the time, and every disagreement is exactly one point. The read is imprecise rather than erratic.
- It is a screening reference, not a substitute for country-level due diligence.