Abstract
We describe a climate risk index that has been developed to inform national climate adaptation planning in Italy and that is further elaborated in this paper. The index supports national authorities in designing adaptation policies and plans, guides the initial problem formulation phase, and identifies administrative areas with higher propensity to being adversely affected by climate change. The index combines (i) climate change-amplified hazards; (ii) high-resolution indicators of exposure of chosen economic, social, natural and built- or manufactured capital (MC) assets and (iii) vulnerability, which comprises both present sensitivity to climate-induced hazards and adaptive capacity. We use standardized anomalies of selected extreme climate indices derived from high-resolution regional climate model simulations of the EURO-CORDEX initiative as proxies of climate change-altered weather and climate-related hazards. The exposure and sensitivity assessment is based on indicators of manufactured, natural, social and economic capital assets exposed to and adversely affected by climate-related hazards. The MC refers to material goods or fixed assets which support the production process (e.g. industrial machines and buildings); Natural Capital comprises natural resources and processes (renewable and non-renewable) producing goods and services for well-being; Social Capital (SC) addressed factors at the individual (people's health, knowledge, skills) and collective (institutional) level (e.g. families, communities, organizations and schools); and Economic Capital (EC) includes owned and traded goods and services. The results of the climate risk analysis are used to rank the subnational administrative and statistical units according to the climate risk challenges, and possibly for financial resource allocation for climate adaptation.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy’.
Highlights
Climate change is both an unprecedented and a defining environmental challenge of our times, compelling bold and urgent actions simultaneously on many fronts
By using ordered weighted average (OWA), on the other hand, we explore to what extent the ensemble mean (OWA AVE) or endpoints (OWA MIN and OWA MAX) reproduce or contract the range estimated by SAW
We describe an index-based methodological approach to assess climate change risk in Italy
Summary
Climate change is both an unprecedented and a defining environmental challenge of our times, compelling bold and urgent actions simultaneously on many fronts. The key components of the climate risk index (CRI) in this paper are hazard (H), i.e. the potential occurrence of a damaging physical event related to climate trends or climate extremes; exposure (E), i.e. the presence of environmental, social or economic elements in places that could be adversely affected; and vulnerability (V), i.e. the predisposition to be adversely affected, comprising a variety of concepts including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and the lack of capacity to cope and adapt [20]. The ESPON Climate change project has developed a comprehensive assessment framework and used it to reveal the variation of the climate change-related challenges across the European regions. By using a multi-models’ ensemble, we can explore the effects of uncertainties stemming from model initialization, parametrization and downscaling
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