Abstract
This paper introduces a climatic multi-hazard risk assessment for Greece, as the first-ever attempt to enhance scientific knowledge for the identification and definition of hazards, a critical element of risk-informed decision making. Building on an extensively validated climate database with a very high spatial resolution (5 × 5 km2), a detailed assessment of key climatic hazards is performed that allows for: (a) the analysis of hazard dynamics and their evolution due to climate change and (b) direct comparisons and spatial prioritization across Greece. The high geographical complexity of Greece requires that a large number of diverse hazards (heatwaves—TX, cold spells—TN, torrential rainfall—RR, snowstorms, and windstorms), need to be considered in order to correctly capture the country’s susceptibility to climate extremes. The current key findings include the dominance of cold-temperature extremes in mountainous regions and warm extremes over the coasts and plains. Extreme rainfall has been observed in the eastern mainland coasts and windstorms over Crete and the Aegean and Ionian Seas. Projections of the near future reveal more warm extremes in northern areas becoming more dominant all over the country by the end of the century.
Highlights
A new era has unequivocally emerged that has brought climate change and its impacts to the foreground of scientific research
Forzieri et al [30] reported that the risks of wildfires, windstorms and inland flooding would increase in Europe, with varying degrees of change across regions, while the most dramatic rise is predicted to be in damages in southern Europe caused by heatwaves, droughts and coastal floods
The analysis focused on four critical climate hazards for Europe: heat and cold extremes, flash floods, and windstorms, each one described by a climate indicator (Section 2.2)
Summary
A new era has unequivocally emerged that has brought climate change and its impacts to the foreground of scientific research. Establishing a harmonized risk understanding would pave the way to a multi-hazard risk assessment, introducing interactions and cascading effects as well as providing some analytical interpretations of the compound and systemic risks This would lead to more credible scenarios for describing future disaster events in terms of their magnitude and probability based on the validated scientific knowledge that can benefit from high-resolution climate projections. The scope of this work was to carry out a very detailed assessment of the most significant hazards that have occurred in Greece in the past and to predict their evolution in the future considering the impact of climate change This is a highly valuable process as disaster management should take into account the (non-)stationary characteristics of climate change.
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