The Climate Impact Explorer, a free online tool providing sectoral impact projections for a wide range of scenarios down to the subnational level

This online climate impact tool was developed as part of a collaboration with the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) aiming at improving the understanding of how physical risks from climate change impact the macro-economic and financial systems. Interactions with stakeholders from the NGFS enabled to identify how tailored climate impact information could facilitate this understanding by fulfilling the following criteria: (i) provision of projections for other scenarios that those classically used in climate science, more tailored to the financial and macro-economic systems, (ii) for many sectoral indicators with a specific interest for economic damages from climate impacts, (iii) with a comprehensive estimate of the associated uncertainty and especially its upper bound, and (iv) in a spatially explicit way but also aggregated over administrative units.

As a result, the Climate Impact Explorer provides impact projections aggregated over all continents, countries and their provinces for many sectoral and economic damage indicators, as well as several global warming levels and various emissions scenarios, including those co-developed with the NGFS. The associated uncertainty ranges encompass both the global climate sensitivity to emissions and the response of local impacts to global warming. The tool also displays maps of projected impacts for 1.5, 2, 2.5 and 3°C of global warming over all countries in the world. All time series plots, maps and underlying data can be freely downloaded.

No dedicated simulations were run to produce the underlying data, instead we made use of the 0.5°x0.5° impact projections from ISIMIP2b, as well as existing runs by the CLIMADA model at a resolution of 5 arcmins for the economic damage indicators. The employed methodology can be applied to any emissions scenarios for which the resulting global warming trajectories are available.

The tool has already been used by central banks and other financial institutions or companies, and has proved of high interest for stakeholders from developing countries where little impact information is available. Efforts are currently ongoing to use information from the Climate Impact Explorer for stress testing of macro-economies to climate physical risks. This should hopefully lead to further improve the understanding of data needs and overall help increase the resilience of economies and the financial system to climate change.