Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment

Climate extremes often imply significant impacts on human and natural systems, and these extreme events are anticipated to be among the potentially most harmful consequences of a changing climate. However, while extreme event impacts are increasingly recognized, methodologies to address such impacts and the degree of our understanding and prediction capabilities vary widely among different sectors and disciplines. Moreover, traditional climate extreme indices and large-scale multi-model intercomparisons that are used for future projections of extreme events and associated impacts often fall short in capturing the full complexity of impact systems.

Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment describes challenges, opportunities and methodologies for the analysis of the impacts of climate extremes across various sectors to support their impact and risk assessment. It thereby also facilitates cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary discussions and exchange among climate and impact scientists. The sectors covered include agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, human health, transport, conflict, and more broadly covering the human-environment nexus. The book concludes with an outlook on the need for more transdisciplinary work and international collaboration between scientists and practitioners to address emergent risks and extreme events towards risk reduction and strengthened societal resilience.

Provides an overview about past, present and future changes in climate and weather extremes and how to connect that knowledge to impact and risk assessment under global warmingPresents different approaches to assess societal-relevant impacts and risk of climate and weather extremes, including compound events, and the complexity of risk cascades and the interconnectedness of societal riskFeatures applications across a diversity of sectors, including agriculture, health, ecosystem services and urban transport

1. Climate extremes and their implications for impact modeling: A short introduction

Jana Sillmann and Sebastian Sippel

2. Climate scenarios and their relevance and implications for impact studies

Claudia Tebaldi and Brian O'Neill

3. Changes in climate extremes in observations and climate model simulations. From the past into the future

Markus Donat, Jana Sillmann and Erich Fischer

4. Multivariate extremes and compound events

Jakob Zscheischler, Bart van den Hurk, Philip Ward and Seth Westra

5. Bias-correction of climate model output for impact models

Alex J. Cannon, Claudio Piani and Sebastian Sippel

6. Anthropogenic changes in tropical cyclones and its impacts

Michael Wehner

7. Machine Learning Applications for Agricultural Impacts Under Extreme Events

Carlos Felipe Gaitan

8. Assessing the F rance 2016 extreme wheat production loss – evaluating our operational capacity to predict complex compound events

Marijn Van der Velde, Rémi Lecerf, Raphaël d’Andrimont and Tamara Ben-Ari

9. Probabilistic drought risk analysis for even-aged forests

Marcel Van Oijen and Miguel Angel de Zavala

10. Projecting health impacts of climate extremes: a methodological overview

Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera, Francesco Sera and Antonio Gasparrini

11. Climate extremes and their implications for impact modelling in transport

Maria Pregnolato, David Jaroszweski, Alistair Ford and Richard Dawson

12. Assessing Vulnerability and Risk of Climate Change

Bapon SHM Fakhruddin, Kate Boylan, Alec Wild and Rebekah Robertson

13. Data challenges limit our global understanding of humanitarian disasters triggered by climate extremes

Miguel D. Mahecha, Debarati Guha-Sapir, Jeroen Smits, Fabian Gans and Guido Kraemer

14. Adaptive capacity of coupled socio-ecological systems to absorb climate extremes

Anja Rammig, Michael Bahn, Carolina Vera, Thomas Knoke, Carola Paul, Björn Vollan, Karlheinz Erb, Richard Bardgett, Stefan Liehr, Sandra Lavorel and Kirsten Thonicke

15. Impacts of Extreme Events on Medieval Societies: Lesson from Climate History

Martin Bauch

16. Climate Extremes and Conflict Dynamics

Jürgen Scheffran

17. Avoiding impacts and impacts avoided - new frontiers in impact science for adaptation research and policy relevant assessments

Carl-Friedrich Schleussner and Benoit P. Guillod

18. Outlook: Challenges for societal resilience under climate extremesOutlook

Markus Reichstein, Dorothea Frank, Jana Sillmann and Sebastian Sippel