The occurrence of extremes such as droughts, flash floods, hailstorms, storm surges and tropical storms can have significant and sometimes catastrophic consequences to society. However, not all low probability weather/climate events will lead to “high impacts” on human or natural systems or infrastructure. Rather, the severity of such events depend also intrinsically on the exposure, vulnerability and/or resilience to such hazards of affected systems, including emergency management procedures. Similarly, high impact events may be compounded by the interaction of several, e.g., in their own right less severe hydro-meteorological incidents, sometimes separated in time and space. Or they may similarly result from the joint failures of multiple human or natural systems. Consequently, it is a deep transdisciplinary challenge to learn from past high impact events, understand the mechanisms behind them and ultimately to project how they may potentially change in a future climate.

The ECRA (European Climate Research Alliance) Collaborative Programme on “High Impact Events and Climate Change” aims to promote research on the mechanisms behind high impact events and climate extremes, simulation of high impact events under present and future climatic conditions, and on how relevant information for climate risk analysis, vulnerability and adaptation may be co-created with users, e.g., in terms of tailored climate services. For this aim, this Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Session invites contributions that will serve to (i) better understand the mechanisms behind high impact events from a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective, e.g. case studies and the assessment of past high impact events, including detection and attribution; (ii) project changes to high impact events through, e.g. high resolution climate and impacts modelling (including economic modelling); (iii) produce climate information at the relevant scales (downscaling); and co-create climate services with users to help deal with the risk and/or impacts of high-impact events, e.g. risk analysis and climate adaptation. Abstracts that highlight recent advances from a transdisciplinary perspective for example through the innovation of climate services will be particularly encouraged. Authors and contributors to this session will be offered to present their work in a Special Issue of the journal “Sustainability”.