The domino effect of climate tipping points: a multidisciplinary perspective on global risks

Papa Giovanni XXIII Bergamo Hospital at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak: Letter from the warfront….

Effects of Climate and Climate Change on Vectors and Vector-Borne Diseases: Ticks Are Different

Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"

Chapter 13 - Climate Change and the Impact on Animals

Hydraulic structures are critical for water management. Yet many structures continue to be neglected, in poor condition, and inadequate in adapting to evolving societal challenges associated with shifting climatic events and population growth. In this context, hydraulic structures engineering should be moving from traditional design considerations toward sustainability, that is, continuing to meet current and future social, environmental, and economic needs. This requires this community to embrace and help advance global and multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore, this article presents the authors' point of view on current trends, concerns, and needs related to hydraulic structures engineering. Furthermore, the authors propose a new, forward‐looking framework for the consideration of the hydraulic structures community that is grounded on the evolution of interconnected research tools and methodologies in addition to emphasizing and bolstering strong links between academia and industry. The evolution of this framework has naturally originated from the pervasive challenge of validating the design and operation of hydraulic structures in the field for frequent and extreme conditions. The authors suggest that future developments of hydraulic structures engineering require (a) continuous updating of complementary tools and methodologies following technological developments, (b) addressing the lack of detailed field observations, (c) increasing interactions of hydraulic specialists with other scientific disciplines and water experts, and (d) restoring a strong collaboration between academia and industry. It is anticipated that in this way the hydraulic structures community, and all of society, will make a new step toward more sustainable and resilient interactions with nature and between communities in water management.This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Engineering Water

COVID-19 served as a stark reminder of the economic devastation caused by poor preparedness for systemic risks. This lack of preparation triggered a domino effect, leading to an economic downturn, soaring debt, and supply chain disruption. The unprecedented global scale of this pandemic has accentuated multiple challenges with risk reduction and capacity to respond, both in the developed world and in the least developed countries. This chapter delves into the interconnectedness of globalization, public health risks, and climate change. First, we review the relationship between globalization and health risks. Subsequently, we explore the potential link between climate change and pandemics. Then, leveraging this understanding of interconnected global challenges, we analyze the response of GCC countries to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analyses show that the COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented test of policymakers’ ability to handle composite risks as climate uncertainties disrupt global epidemic responses. Although short-term measures can play a role in minimizing climate-induced loss of life, climate adaptation necessitates a long-term strategy toward pandemic preparedness as well. In the wake of the pandemic, leading economies should shift their focus away from short-term economic benefits that could undermine ecosystems and their services to society. On the contrary, this pandemic can serve as a starting point for a transformation to achieve sustainable development that merges environmental, economic, and social considerations.

Coping with extreme climate events and its related climatic disasters caused by climate change has become a global issue and drew wide attention from scientists, policy-makers and public. This paper calculated the expected annual multiple climatic hazards intensity index based on the results of nine climatic hazards including tropical cyclone, flood, landslide, storm surge, sand-dust storm, drought, heat wave, cold wave and wildfire. Then a vulnerability model involving the coping capacity indicator with mortality rate, affected population rate and GDP loss rate, was developed to estimate the expected annual affected population, mortality and GDP loss risks. The results showed that: countries with the highest risks are also the countries with large population or GDP. To substantially reduce the global total climatic hazards risks, these countries should reduce the exposure and improving the governance of integrated climatic risk; Without considering the total exposure, countries with the high mortality rate, affected population rate or GDP loss rate, which also have higher or lower coping capacity, such as the Philippines, Bangladesh and Vietnam, are the hotspots of the planning and strategy making for the climatic disaster risk reduction and should focus on promoting the coping capacity.

This study investigates the impact of extreme climate events on global systemic financial risk, utilizing a dataset of 32 representative economies from 2004 to 2019. By constructing a Climate Risk Index and a systemic financial risk index (RISK), our findings reveal that extreme climate change significantly exacerbates global systemic financial risk. We find this effect to be particularly pronounced in developing countries. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that country‐level ESG performance can effectively mitigate the adverse impact of extreme climate events, with the environmental (E) dimension exhibiting the most prominent moderating effect. We also find that the mitigating efficacy of ESG is conditioned by national cultural values. In addition, this research uncovers a significant synergistic effect between ESG performance and robotics adoption, highlighting a cross‐domain strategic complementarity that plays a crucial role in enhancing the resilience of the financial system.

Climate change is a global risk since its origins and consequences transcend national boundaries. Non-Western media has also begun to recognise climate change as a significant issue that must be addressed. Despite its nominal national emissions and accounting for only 0.50% of global emissions, Pakistan is facing particularly severe consequences from disasters, floods, droughts, rising temperatures, cyclones, and rising sea levels as a result of global emissions. (Worldometers, 2023). Pakistan has been deemed at high risk of catastrophic climate events such as floods, storms, melting glaciers, landslides, rising sea levels, droughts, and food shortages by the World Bank. To avoid these impending tragedies, climate change supporters have emphasised the use of media for mass awareness, both at the policy and public levels. This study examines resilience-focused journalism in flood risk coverage in a climate-affected country like Pakistan. Journalists covering weather-related topics were questioned in order to investigate resilience-focused journalism practices based on motivation, techniques, and the impact of prominent news channels' coverage of flood risk. This study investigates the motivations, tactics, and impact of media coverage of flood risk in Pakistan, and it adds to our understanding of risk communication and news production practices by focusing on why and how broadcast journalists were unable to communicate flooding risks and influence policy change. The data was evaluated using thematic analysis after semi-structured in-depth interviews were done.

A novel approach to reduce fire-induced domino effect risk by leveraging loading/unloading demands in chemical industrial parks

Forecasting disruptions in global food value chains to tackle food insecurity: The role of AI and big data analytics – A bibliometric and scientometric analysis

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, disruptions to basic services, such as access to healthcare, electricity, and mobility, may severely impact the functioning of society.  As both infrastructure investments and occurrence of extreme weather and climate events are at an all-time high, critical infrastructures are more exposed than ever to such adverse phenomena. While societal impacts of basic service disruptions can be substantial and widely felt, this aspect of risk is rarely captured in classic risk assessments. In this contribution, we are shedding light on this wider, socio-technical dimension of natural hazard-induced risks, in a globally consistent manner.For a selection of countries differing in size, world region, population density and income group, we compute spatially explicit patterns of basic service disruptions (access to power, healthcare, education, mobility and telecommunications) caused by historically observed tropical cyclone and flood events, and repeat the assessment with events commensurate with climate chance projections. To this end, we use the open-source risk assessment platform CLIMADA [1] and a bespoke network modelling approach relying on real-world infrastructure and population data [2]. We highlight geographic risk hotspots and demonstrate the importance of considering system interdependencies and cascading failures as opposed to static damage estimates to capture infrastructure risks from a human-centric perspective. Further, we study the influence of (country-specific) infrastructure network characteristics to develop heuristics (“rules of thumb”) of determinants which either perpetuate failure cascades or contribute to resilience.First results indicate, among others, that i) basic services which heavily rely on supporting infrastructure (such as healthcare and education access) are more likely to be disrupted, ii) floods cause different service disruption patterns than strong winds, iii) locations where service disruptions are experienced may diverge from locations with highest hazard intensities. [1] Aznar-Siguan, G. and D.N. Bresch (2019) CLIMADA v1: A Global Weather and Climate Risk Assessment Platform. Geoscientific Model Development 2 (7): 3085–9. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd- 12-3085-2019 [2] Mühlhofer, E., E. E. Koks, C. M. Kropf, G.  Sansavini and D. N. Bresch. (in review). “A Generalized Natural Hazard Risk Modelling Framework for Infrastructure Failure Cascades.” https://doi.org/10.31223/X54M17 

Human population health has always been central in the justification for sustainable development but nearly invisible in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations. Current scientific evidence indicates that climate change will contribute to the global burden of disease through increases in diarrhoeal disease, vector-borne disease, and malnutrition, and the health impacts of extreme weather and climate events. A few studies have estimated future potential health impacts of climate change but often generate little policy-relevant information. Robust estimates of future health impacts rely on robust projections of future disease patterns. The application of a standardized and established methodology has been developed to quantify the impact of climate change in relation to different greenhouse gas emission scenarios. All health risk assessments are necessarily biased toward conservative best-estimates of health effects that are easily measured. Global, regional, and national risk assessments can take no account of irreversibility, or plausible low-probability events with potentially very high burdens on human health. There is no "safe limit" of climate change with respect to health impacts as health systems in some regions do not adequately cope with the current climate variability. Current scientific methods cannot identify global threshold health effects in order for policymakers to regulate a "tolerable" amount of climate change. We argue for the need for more research to reduce the potential impacts of climate change on human health, including the development of improved methods for quantitative risk assessment. The large uncertainty about the future effects of climate change on human population health should be a reason to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and not a reason for inaction.

Subject Climate and disaster risk. Significance Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rose to record levels in May, while last year was the fourth-warmest on record, averaging 1 degree above preindustrial levels, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)’s ‘2018 State of the Global Climate’ report. Some 62 million people were affected by natural hazards in 2018, mostly related to weather and climate events. Flooding affected 35 million people, while drought hit a further 9 million. Exposure to extreme heat events also increased, with only a few parts of the world seeing below-average temperatures. Impacts Increased wildfire risks, from rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, will exacerbate air pollution impacts. Climate impacts will create ‘secondary’ refugee displacement, affecting groups such as the Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Tropical cyclones, such as those that recently hit Mozambique and India, will be intensified by warming waters increasing disaster risks.

Large volcanic eruptions are key time markers in paleoclimatology because they inject large quantities of volcanic fallout (such as sulfuric acids and tephra) into the atmosphere which is then widely distributed and deposited in environmental archives such as ice cores, lakes and peat bogs. They also produce strong climate effects, imprinted in climate archives such as tree-rings. The caldera-forming eruption of Mount Mazama (Crater Lake, Oregon, USA) some 7700 years ago ranks among the largest eruptions of the Holocene but little is known about its exact timing and global-scale climate impacts. Here we use new high-resolution ice-core analyses of volatiles (S, Cl), particle-size distribution, crypto-tephra and sulfur isotopes (33S, 34S), from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica, to constrain the date, stratospheric sulfur injection, global aerosol distribution and climate forcing of this eruption. We further demonstrate that the climatic effects left distinctive fingerprints in ultra-long tree-ring chronologies from North America and Europe allowing the date of this eruption to be pinned to a specific year, thereby aligning climate proxy records in North America, Greenland and Europe on a common timeline. Using an ensemble of fully-coupled Earth System Model simulations we identify some key regions experiencing large anomalies in temperature and hydro-climate following the Mt. Mazama eruption. These extreme conditions were not only relevant for hunter-gatherer communities and early agricultural societies emerging in Eurasia, that experienced these compounding effects, but they also help us in identifying a global existential risk arising from comparable eruptions in the future.