The five countries at the top of our stress index — and what they share

The five at the top

Today's composite stress index ranks Yemen (0.93), Palestine (0.92), Iran (0.91), Haiti (0.90) and Syria (0.90) at the top.

The index is built from five inputs:

1. Energy import dependency + days-of-cover
2. Cereal self-sufficiency + food posture
3. Macro fiscal headroom (debt-to-GDP, currency depreciation)
4. Geographic water stress (WRI Aqueduct)
5. Geopolitical fragility (event density × severity)

What the composition reveals

Click each row to open the per-commodity breakdown (explorable on the map filter chips):

• Yemen: oil=0.64 · wheat=0.75 · water=0.92. A water-and-cereal story first, oil import second.
• Palestine: oil=0.98 · wheat=0.95 · water=0.92. The composite is high on every dimension; the gas score (0.40) is the only modest one.
• Iran: oil=0.48 · wheat=0.24 · water=0.88. The lowest food and oil stress of the five — but water and macro fragility carry the score.
• Haiti: oil=0.98 · water=0.40 · macro very weak. A pure import-dependence + governance story.
• Syria: oil=0.79 · wheat=0.60 · water=0.85. War economy distortions amplify each input.

What they share

Two structural features cut across:

1. Negligible commercial stockpile capacity. None of the five has a meaningful Strategic Petroleum Reserve equivalent or a 90-day cereal buffer. When supply rolls over, there is no cushion.

2. Coupled fragility. A disruption in one dimension (energy import, water, fiscal) doesn't stay confined. The IMF's standard contagion model assumes correlated shocks at composite stress above 0.85 — and these five are systematically above that line.

The point of the exercise

The stress index does not predict default or crisis on a specific date. It identifies where the operational buffers are thin enough that a small external shock turns into a domestic political event. For corporate clients with personnel or supply touchpoints in any of these jurisdictions, the index is the prompt to refresh the continuity plan — not to evacuate. We track this via Resiplan for the operational layer.

Limitations

• The water input is a regional baseline (WRI Aqueduct), not real-time
• The geopolitical fragility input lags published event data by 24-72 hours
• The composite weights are constant across countries; some argue for region-specific weights

We publish the methodology and the per-input scores at /methodology.

Sources: shortage.life country_profiles, WRI Aqueduct, IMF DataMapper, UCDP/ACLED-equivalent event stream.