The extreme weather risk indicators (EWRI) for the European transport system

The European 7th Framework Programme project Extreme Weather impacts on European Networks of Transport devised a holistic analysis of extreme weather risks for the transport system. The analysis provided an overview of extreme weather risks, or a risk panorama. The risk panorama was built on a probabilistic approach to extreme weather phenomena occurrences and on vulnerability analysis based on selected macro-level economic and transport system indicators of the member states of EU-27. The panorama covers all transport modes and views infrastructure-related risks, time delay risks, and accidents risks. In addition to climatic circumstances, the devised risk indicator is also dependent on regional circumstances, such as population and transport density and income level. This paper describes the construct and application of an extreme weather risk indicator (EWRI). EWRIs are counted for each country and each transport mode separately. Furthermore, this paper also presents the most significant extreme weather events in different parts of Europe and on the transport modes they affect the most.     

The impact of extreme weather and climate change on inland waterway transport

Similarly to other modes of transport, inland waterway transport has to deal with weather events, affecting navigation conditions and the infrastructure on inland waterways. Most significant extreme weather events result from high precipitation, droughts and temperatures below zero degrees Celsius. Heavy rainfall, in particular in association with snow melt, may lead to floods resulting in suspension of navigation and causing damage to the inland waterway infrastructure as well as the property and health of human beings living in areas exposed to flooding. Long periods of drought may lead to reduced discharge and low water levels, limiting the cargo-carrying capacity of vessels and increasing the specific costs of transportation. Temperatures below zero degrees Celsius over a longer period may cause the appearance of ice on waterways, leading to suspension of navigation and possible damage to infrastructure, for example, buoys. Neither extreme weather events as well as climate change are new phenomena nor is their general occurrence expected to change suddenly. However, due to climate change, extreme weather events may change positively or adversely in severity and frequency of occurrence, depending on the respective weather event and the location of its occurrence. This paper gives an overview of the impact of extreme weather events on inland waterway transport in Europe, focussed on the Rhine–Main–Danube corridor, followed by a discussion on how climate change will change these events and their impacts.     

Climate change and increased risk for the insurance sector: a global perspective and an assessment for the Netherlands

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As a consequence, economic losses caused by natural catastrophes could increase significantly. This will have considerable consequences for the insurance sector. On the one hand, increased risk from weather extremes requires assessing expected changes in damage and including adequate climate change projections in risk management. On the other hand, climate change can also bring new business opportunities for insurers. This paper gives an overview of the consequences of climate change for the insurance sector and discusses several strategies to cope with and adapt to increased risks. The particular focus is on the Dutch insurance sector, as the Netherlands is extremely vulnerable to climate change, especially with regard to extreme precipitation and flooding. Current risk sharing arrangements for weather risks are examined while potential new business opportunities, adaptation strategies, and public–private partnerships are identified.     

Recent trends in pre-monsoon daily temperature extremes over India

Extreme climate and weather events are increasingly being recognized as key aspects of climate change. Pre-monsoon season (March–May) is the hottest part of the year over almost the entire South Asian region, in which hot weather extremes including heat waves are recurring natural hazards having serious societal impacts, particularly on human health. In the present paper, recent trends in extreme temperature events for the pre-monsoon season have been studied using daily data on maximum and minimum temperatures over a well-distributed network of 121 stations for the period 1970–2005. For this purpose, time series of extreme temperature events have been constructed for India as a whole and seven homogeneous regions, viz., Western Himalaya (WH), Northwest (NW), Northeast (NE), North Central (NC), East coast (EC), West coast (WC) and Interior Peninsula (IP).     

Adapting rail and road networks to weather extremes: case studies for southern Germany and Austria

The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems reveals high costs in specific locations. Prominent examples for Europe are the economic consequences of the harsh winter periods 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 and the floods in Austria, Eastern Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom in 2005 and 2007. Departing from the EC-funded project WEATHER, this paper delves into the subject of adaptation strategies by revisiting the project’s general findings on adaptation strategies and by adding two specific cases: (1) advanced winter maintenance on roads in southwest Germany and (2) technical and organizational measures in Alpine rail transport. For these two cases, feasible adaptation strategies are elaborated and their potential is discussed in light of damage cost forecasts up to 2050. For the road sector, we find a high potential to mitigate weather-related costs, although damages here are expected to decline. In contrast, rail systems face strongly increasing damages and the mitigation options offered by improved information and communication systems seem to be largely exploited. Consequently, it is easier to justify expensive adaptation measures for high-cost rail infrastructures than for road transport. A generic analysis of 14 damage cases worldwide, however, revealed that generally awareness raising, cooperation and communication strategies are sufficient to mitigate the most severe damages by natural disasters.     

Designing a long-term flood risk management plan for the Scheldt estuary using a risk-based approach

The Scheldt is a tidal river that originates in France and flows through Belgium and the Netherlands. The tides create significant flood risks in both the Flemish region in Belgium and the Netherlands. Due to sea level rise and economic development, flood risks will increase during this century. This is the main reason for the Flemish government to update its flood risk management plan. For this purpose, the Flemish government requested a cost-benefit analysis of flood protection measures, considering long-term developments. Measures evaluated include a storm surge barrier, dyke heightening and additional floodplains with or without the development of wetlands. Some of these measures affect the flood risk in both countries. As policies concerning the limitation of flood risk differ significantly between the Netherlands and Flanders, distinctive methodologies were used to estimate the impacts of measures on flood risk. A risk-based approach was applied for Flanders by calculating the impacts of flood damage at different levels of recurrence, for the base year (2000) and in case of a sea level rise of 60 cm by 2100. Policy within the Netherlands stipulates a required minimal protection level along the Scheldt against storms with a recurrence period of 1 in 4,000 years. It was estimated how flood protection measures would delay further dyke heightening, which is foreseen as protection levels are presently decreasing due to rising sea levels. Impacts of measures (safety benefits) consist of delays in further dyke heightening. The results illustrate the importance of sea level rise. Flood risks increased fivefolds when a sea level rise of 60 cm was applied. Although more drastic measures such as a storm surge barrier near Antwerp offer more protection for very extreme storms, a combination of dykes and floodplains can offer higher benefits at lower costs.     

Climate extremes: an observation and projection of its impacts on food production in ASEAN

Climate change alters global food systems, especially agriculture and fisheries—significant aspects of the livelihoods and food security of populations. The 2014 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report identified Southeast Asia as the most vulnerable coastal region in the world, and highlighted the potential distribution of impacts and risks of climate change in the region. While climate hazards may differ across geographical regions, the impact of climate extremes on food production will affect marginal farmers, fishers and poor urban consumers disproportionately, as they have limited capacities to adapt to and recover from extreme weather events. Governments and other stakeholders need to respond to climate extremes and incorporate adaptation into national development plans. Unfortunately, there is still limited peer-review publication on the subject matter. This paper presents some findings from research on observed and projected loss and damage inflicted by climate extremes on agricultural crops in Southeast Asia.     

Analysis of extreme precipitation and its variability under climate change in a river basin

Natural Hazards - This study investigated the variation of extreme precipitation on a catchment under climate change. Extreme value analysis using generalized extreme value distribution was used to...     

Decision support method for GHG emission management in industries

Keeping temperature rise well below 2 °C is Paris Climate Agreement’s main commitment and corporate-level participation will be crucial to achieve national mitigation targets. Hence, companies should adopt measures that allow them to adapt to upcoming scenarios where low-carbon production is expected to become mandatory and a great competitive advantage. However, mitigation strategies cannot be evaluated without consideration of subjective environmental criteria. Consequently, lack of decision support methodologies for climate change evaluation in industries is a barrier for innovation. Aiming at consideration of non-monetary aspects, we develop a support method that incorporates costs, benefits, opportunities and risks related to climate change in manufacturing industries. First, we compared the most relevant multi-criteria decision analysis methodologies and identified an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as the most suitable for ranking corporate climate change strategies. Then, we collected global analysis criteria from the most important socially responsible investment indices, and climate change scientific studies. To adapt these criteria to the AHP method, each criterion was sorted into benefits, opportunities, costs or risks hierarchies. Proposed method was efficient for assessing long-term subjective criteria and ranking alternatives for GHG emission management in two large manufacturing companies. A sensitivity analysis of the outcome revealed its consistency and flexibility for ranking alternatives and weighting criteria. Finally, the method is not limited to a particular type of industry and it can be adapted to other areas, such as service companies, sanitation or public sector.     

气候变化对山东降水及极端天气气候事件的影响分析

根据新中国成立以来山东省气温资料进行分析,从温度变化来反映山东气候变暖的趋势;在此基础上根据山东省近60年的水文资料分析气候变化对山东降水及极端天气气候事件的影响。结果表明,60年来山东气候呈变暖趋势,随着气候的变化,山东省年降水量呈减少的趋势,并导致极端天气气候事件出现频率及强度呈增大趋势。     

Climate Change and Human Health: Risk Assessments,Early Signals and Response Strategies

Climate change is considered as the biggest global health threat of the 21^st century. The increasing adverse health effects of climate change has been a public concern worldwide. In order to develop the specific health response strategies, a key research project, "Climate change and human health: Risk assessments, early signals and response strategies", was approved by the National Key R & D Program of China in May 2018. This project will integrate researchers from multidisciplinary background, such as public health, medicine, meteorological sciences, disaster management, to address the following scientific questions: ①The impact of climate change on population health and its regional heterogeneity; ②The underlying mechanisms and pathways of how climate change and extreme events impact on health; ③Capture of the early signals of climate system anomalies which may lead to regional health risks; ④The comprehensive health risk assessments and development of coping strategies for tackling climate change. This project will improve our understanding of climate change and health and help policy maker to develop national and local responses to climate change in China.     

National vulnerability to extreme climatic events: the cases of electricity disruption in China and Japan

Extreme climatic events are likely to adversely affect many countries throughout the world, but the degrees among countries may be different. China and Japan are the countries with high incidences of extreme weather/disaster, both facing with the urgent task of addressing climate change. This study seeks to quantitatively compare the impacts of extreme climatic events on socioeconomic systems (defined as vulnerability) of the two countries by simulating the consequences of hypothetical same degree of electricity disruption along with extreme events. To do that, two computable general equilibrium models are constructed, by using which three-stage scenarios are simulated for China and Japan, respectively. The results reveal that China and Japan have unequal socioeconomic vulnerabilities to extreme events. (1) Negative impact of the same degree of power outages is bigger on China’s socioeconomic system than on that of Japan, and this difference is more obvious in the very short-run scenario. (2) The decline of China’s GDP, total output, and employment levels is 2–3 times higher than that of Japan, while the difference of the resident welfare levels is sharper, which of China drops 3–5 times of Japan. (3) Structural factors are the main reason for vulnerability differences between China and Japan, including the differences of expenditure structure, factor input structure for production of life requirement sectors, material and energy dependence for the production of industrial sectors, and usage structure of services outputs. Based on these findings, some policy implications and recommendations for fairness issues on climate change adaptation are proposed.     

Preparing for real-time weather risk management: the decision models of household evacuation under uncertainty for Taiwanese and US residents

Natural Hazards - The frequency of extreme weather events has increased in recent decades due to climate change, and the demand for both more accurate weather forecasts and early warnings surges in...     

A comparison of stochastic and deterministic downscaling methods for modelling potential groundwater recharge under climate change in East Anglia, UK: implications for groundwater resource management

Groundwater resource estimates require the calculation of recharge using a daily time step. Within climate-change impact studies, this inevitably necessitates temporal downscaling of global or regional climate model outputs. This paper compares future estimates of potential groundwater recharge calculated using a daily soil-water balance model and climate-change weather time series derived using change factor (deterministic) and weather generator (stochastic) methods for Coltishall, UK. The uncertainty in the results for a given climate-change scenario arising from the choice of downscaling method is greater than the uncertainty due to the emissions scenario within a 30-year time slice. Robust estimates of the impact of climate change on groundwater resources require stochastic modelling of potential recharge, but this has implications for groundwater model runtimes. It is recommended that stochastic modelling of potential recharge is used in vulnerable or sensitive groundwater systems, and that the multiple recharge time series are sampled according to the distribution of contextually important time series variables, e.g. recharge drought severity and persistence (for water resource management) or high recharge years (for groundwater flooding). Such an approach will underpin an improved understanding of climate change impacts on sustainable groundwater resource management based on adaptive management and risk-based frameworks.     

New risk assessment products for dealing with financial exposure to weather hazards

A market place designed to provide a variety of weather-sensitive institutions with products for dealing with their risks from weather-climate hazards has been developing in recent years. Shifts in demographics, growing population, and greater wealth across the U.S., coupled with de-regulation of utilities and expansion of global economics, have increased corporate vulnerability to weather/climate extremes. Availability of long-term quality climate data and new technologies have allowed development of weather-risk products. One widely used by electric-gas utilities is weather derivatives. These allow a utility to select a financially critical seasonal weather threshold and for a price paid to a provider, to get financial payments if this threshold is exceeded. Another new product primarily used by the insurance industry is weather risk models. These define the potential risks of severe weather losses across a region where little historical insured loss data exists. Firms develop weather-risk models based on historical storm information combined with a target region’s societal, economic, and physical conditions. Examples of the derivatives and weather-risk models and their uses are presented. These various endeavors of the new weather market exhibit the potential for dealing with shifts in weather risks due to a change in climate.     

冰冻圈变化对经济社会系统的综合影响及其适应性管理策略

冰冻圈是气候系统影响最直接和最敏感的圈层。在全球变化背景下,冰冻圈变化与生物圈、岩石圈、水圈、大气圈、人类圈之间的相互作用日趋加剧。特别地,冰冻圈快速变化对其影响区经济社会系统产生了广泛而深刻的负面影响,甚至危及人类福祉、经济社会系统的健康、和谐、持续发展。鉴于冰冻圈区位劣势及其较为落后的经济水平,其应对冰冻圈变化的能力极为有限。目前,适应仍然是冰冻圈应对气候变化的主要途径。冰冻圈变化对经济社会系统的综合影响分析是适应冰冻圈快速变化的基础,其适应性管理战略则是减轻冰冻圈快速变化不利影响、降低自然和经济社会系统防御其不利影响脆弱性的最终目标。     

Adaptation to climate change in the insurance sector: examples from the UK,Germany and the Netherlands

Adaptation to climate change, particularly flood risks, may come to pose large challenges in the future and will require cooperation among a range of stakeholders. However, there presently exists little research especially on the integration of the private sector in adaptation. In particular, recently developed state programs for adaptation have so far been focused on the public sector. Insurance providers may have much to contribute as they offer other parts of society services to appropriately identify, assess and reduce the financial impacts of climate change-induced risks. This study aims to explore how the institutional distribution of responsibility for flood risk is being renegotiated within the UK, Germany and Netherlands. Examining how the insurance industry and the public sector can coordinate their actions to promote climate change adaptation, the study discusses how layered natural hazard insurance systems may result from attempts to deal with increasing risks due to increasing incidences of extreme events and climate change. It illustrates that concerns over the risks from extreme natural events have prompted re-assessments of the current systems, with insurance requiring long-term legislative frameworks that defines the objectives and responsibilities of insurers and the different political authorities.     

The application of cascading consequences for emergency management operations

How societies organize themselves to respond to cascading impacts exacerbated by climate change will help define the future of disaster planning, mitigation, response, and recovery. Current emergency management risk analyses focus on identifying a broad array of threats and hazards that may affect an area. However, there is limited attention and understanding of the totality of hazard impacts, the relationship of consequences across disasters, and the dangers of not addressing critical capabilities necessary to rapidly managing consequences—including the potential to create new incidents within incidents. Through a focused review of the related literature and guiding policy documents, this study aims to provide a cascading consequence-based framework that can support emergency managers in the analysis of their jurisdictional risks, development of emergency operations plans, and decision-making. Results include the identification of an alternative framework to identify cascading networks, the creation of a supplementary model for downstream risk assessment, and refined Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis (THIRA) outputs for improved grant allocation. The proposed framework has the potential to help organizations factor both conspicuous and downstream consequences into their Emergency Operations Plans in the planning and mitigations phases. This proposed refinement, which looks deeper into the progression of a disaster, has both national and international implications.

     

Climate change risks for severe storms in developing countries in the context of poverty and inequality in Cambodia

Least developed countries are generally regarded as particularly sensitive to climate change due to among other vulnerable locations and low adaptation capabilities. In the present study, we address climate change hazards in least developed countries by presenting a methodological framework, which is suitable for the estimation damage costs as a function of risk aversion, equality, income distribution and climate scenario using state-of-the-art climate model projections. As a case study, the methodology is applied to study severe storms in Cambodia based on two future climate scenarios and data on historical damages from storm events, which are used as a proxy in performing a sensitivity analysis on all input parameters. For the assumptions and parameter ranges used here, the study shows a high sensitivity to the income distribution (reflected by discount rates) and risk aversion and smaller effects from equality measures and extreme wind climate scenario. We emphasize that the assumptions on risk aversion reflecting consumption smoothing possibilities of low-income households clearly depicts that climate risks can be particularly high as a consequence of poverty and therefore recommend that context-specific vulnerabilities and equity concerns in climate risk studies should be included when making assessments for least developed countries.     

The influence of model structure on groundwater recharge rates in climate-change impact studies

Numerous modeling approaches are available to provide insight into the relationship between climate change and groundwater recharge. However, several aspects of how hydrological model choice and structure affect recharge predictions have not been fully explored, unlike the well-established variability of climate model chains—combination of global climate models (GCM) and regional climate models (RCM). Furthermore, the influence on predictions related to subsoil parameterization and the variability of observation data employed during calibration remain unclear. This paper compares and quantifies these different sources of uncertainty in a systematic way. The described numerical experiment is based on a heterogeneous two-dimensional reference model. Four simpler models were calibrated against the output of the reference model, and recharge predictions of both reference and simpler models were compared to evaluate the effect of model structure on climate-change impact studies. The results highlight that model simplification leads to different recharge rates under climate change, especially under extreme conditions, although the different models performed similarly under historical climate conditions. Extreme weather conditions lead to model bias in the predictions and therefore must be considered. Consequently, the chosen calibration strategy is important and, if possible, the calibration data set should include climatic extremes in order to minimise model bias introduced by the calibration. The results strongly suggest that ensembles of climate projections should be coupled with ensembles of hydrogeological models to produce credible predictions of future recharge and with the associated uncertainties.