Climate and hazards
Climate risk in the IPCC sense is the combination of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, plus the risk created by responses themselves; the field's hard problems are compound extremes, regional detail and decisions that must be made before the uncertainty narrows.
- Institution
- The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
- Service level
- R0: information and enquiries
The short answer.
Climate and hazards as a field of risk covers the physical climate and the hazards it drives, such as heat, drought, floods, storms and sea-level rise, observed and projected with stated uncertainty. In the Nexus Consortium it is studied as science at GCRI by Water Nexus and Food Nexus, governed at GRF by Diplomacy Nexus as well as Climate and Nature Governance, and understood financially at GRA by Insurance Nexus and Banking Nexus; this gateway links those platforms and the methods they share.
The field, seen three ways.
Science and evidence
Water Nexus, Food Nexus, Energy Nexus, Biodiversity Nexus, Climate and Hazards, Disaster Resilience and Recovery, Oceans and Coasts, Space and Earth Observation
Financial understanding
Insurance Nexus, Banking Nexus, Asset Management Nexus, Reinsurance and Catastrophe, Climate and Nature Financial Risk
Compound and concurrent extremes, not averages.
Global mean warming is well constrained; what decision-makers need is less so. Heat waves coinciding with drought, sequential cyclones in one season, and simultaneous crop-failure years across breadbaskets are where losses become systemic. IPCC AR6 Working Group I assessed increasing frequency of concurrent hot and dry events with high confidence, and Working Group II framed risk as including the risks of maladaptation and of mitigation responses.
| Question | Method class | Main uncertainty |
|---|---|---|
| How often will this extreme recur? | Extreme value analysis on observed and simulated series | Non-stationarity, short records |
| Was this event made more likely? | Probabilistic event attribution | Model fitness for the event type |
| What will this region look like? | Downscaled ensembles (CMIP, CORDEX) | Structural model spread and emission pathway |
| Where do extremes coincide? | Multivariate and spatially compound analysis | Dependence structure in the tails |
Bodies and agreements that set the terms.
| Framework or body | What it governs or supplies |
|---|---|
| IPCC assessment reports | Assessed physical science, impacts and response options; AR7 is in preparation |
| Paris Agreement and the Global Goal on Adaptation | Mitigation commitments and the adaptation goal's framework and indicators |
| WMO and the Global Framework for Climate Services | Observations, standards and climate services to national bodies |
| Early Warnings for All | Aim of universal early-warning coverage, with hazard monitoring as one of four pillars |
| ISO 14090 series | Adaptation planning principles for organizations |
Where climate risk turns into other risks.
- Into water and food, through precipitation change, heat and evaporative demand.
- Into insurance and sovereign finance, through insured loss, protection gaps and post-disaster spending.
- Into health, through heat mortality and vector range shifts.
Hazard science is on Climate and Hazards; methods start from climate science.
The methods behind the field.
- Hydrology and water science
- Water and environmental engineering
- Geospatial information systems
- Earth observation and remote sensing
- Sensors, IoT and observation networks
- Forecasting and time-series analysis
- Extreme value theory and tail risk
- Spatial statistics and geostatistics
- Uncertainty quantification and model validation
- Agricultural, soil and food science
- Ecology and biodiversity science
- Optimization and operations research
- Econometrics
- Biotechnology platforms
- Energy generation, storage and grid technology
- Power systems engineering
- Reliability and resilience engineering
- Network science and contagion
- Materials science and chemistry
- Process and industrial safety engineering
- Complex systems and agent-based modelling
- Causal inference and impact evaluation
- Ocean and coastal science
- Climate and atmospheric science
- Earth and geophysical science
- High-performance, cloud and edge computing
- Space systems and satellite services
- Decision analysis under uncertainty
- Social and behavioural science
- Structural and earthquake engineering
- Communications and network technology
- Physics and quantum science
- Policy, institutional and decision science
- Game theory and mechanism design
- Actuarial mathematics
- Probability and statistics
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Financial economics and macro-finance
- Financial and risk engineering
- Scenario design and stress testing
Terms used on this page.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Hazard | A process, phenomenon or human activity that may cause loss of life, injury, damage or disruption, in UNDRR usage. |
| Nationally determined contribution | A country's climate plan and targets under the Paris Agreement, updated in successive rounds and informed by the global stocktake. |
| Physical risk | Financial risk from climate hazards, both acute events and chronic shifts, that damage assets and disrupt activity. |
| Climate extreme | A value of a weather or climate variable above or below a threshold near the ends of its observed range. |
Where this page's references lead.
The bodies and documents this page is read against. Status and editions change; each link goes to the issuing body.
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II
- IPCC Seventh Assessment cycle (status of reports)
- UNFCCC Global Goal on Adaptation and the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience
- Global Framework for Climate Services (WMO)
- Early Warnings for All initiative (WMO, UNDRR, ITU, IFRC)
Questions and answers.
Why does GCRI host field gateways?
Around GCRI.
Start with an enquiry.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.