Assessing Liberia’s Climate Vulnerability through Statistical and Predictive Models: Trends, Drivers, and Policy Insights (1995–2035)

Liberia has an urgent need for long-run vulnerability tracking, since many climate shocks and institutional vulnerabilities exist, threatening sustainable development and resilience planning efforts. Using national- level evidence data (1995 to 2023) acquired from ND-GAIN, this study used Pearson correlation, PCA, stepwise regression with robust standard errors, ARIMA and ETS models, and structural break detection to analyze temporal dependencies of climate vulnerability in Liberia. The results show Sensitivity and Health as main predictors, associated with household fragility, which is consistent with ecosystems and public health threat exposure, and Capacity and Infrastructure as moderate influences, which contributed to enhancing this risk factor. PCA revealed that the first two components accounted for around 86% of the variance, in agreement with the dimensional coherence of the vulnerability variable. A close-to-perfect model fit reflected the composite nature of the vulnerability index in the stepwise regression. At the same time, the forecast projected a slight increase, followed by a plateauing trend through 2035. Structural break analysis identified inflection points aligning with the transitioning of governance and changing economy. Overall, the findings highlight the need to strengthen institutional capacity, climate-proof critical infrastructure, and enhance ecosystem and health-system resilience, in alignment with Liberia’s NAP (2020), NDC 3.0 (2025), and related national policy frameworks.