Climate risks have gained widespread attention as more and more people, regions and countries are affected. However, it is not always clear what a climate risk actually is or how it is defined.
The IPCC defines a climate risk as the combined effects of a climate hazard, exposition and vulnerability – a clearly defined concept, yet, as we all know – the devil is in the details. To estimate climate risk, we thus need to know the severity of the hazard and if we are exposed and vulnerable to it.
Different exposures to hazards
Climate #hazards are f.i. flooding events, heat waves, droughts or storms. For past events they are identified from observation. But to know what hazards we are facing in the future, climate projections (from climate models) are used.
The good thing is that not every location on the globe is evenly affected by the same hazard, a fact that is represented by the #exposition. For instance, if a settlement is located at a riverbank it is potentially exposed to fluvial flooding, whereas a city far away from any water body isn’t. Since any exposition is in relation to a specific hazard, a city not exposed to flooding might still be exposed to the hazard “heat”.
The last point – #vulnerability – contains different aspects. On the one hand, it reflects our sensitivity to a specific hazard, e.g. very young as well as elderly people are more sensitive to heat than healthy adults. On the other hand, vulnerability can be strongly reduced by adaptation measures taken such as reducing the heat load in cities through greening measures.
KNOWING mitigation and adaptation
#KNOWING focuses on the interaction of mitigation and adaptation measures, since mitigating climate change is crucial to ensures that we can still cope with future climate hazards and their related risks, and adaptation because already now we are affected by human made climate change and we need to reduce exposition or vulnerability to cope with climate change.
