Many-hazard Risk Assessment with the CLIMADA Data API

As the climate and the risks of extreme weather to society change, access to tools for researchers and decision makers to assess the possible evolution of impacts should be facilitated. The open-source modelling platform CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation) allows to investigate the present and future statistical risk of natural hazards to human and economic systems, from the local to the global scale. One of the latest additions to the platform is an Application Programming Interface (API) providing access to exposure and hazard data to perform risk assessments on a consistent 4km grid. Hazard sets for tropical cyclones, droughts, heat-waves, wildfires, river floods, and crop-yield are, or will imminently be available at a worldwide scale on the API. In addition, region-specific hazards such as European winter storms are available. As for the exposures at risk, both population count and assets can be considered based on the data produced trough the CLIMADA LitPop module.

Owing to the availability of globally consistent hazard and exposures datasets through the CLIMADA API, it is now possible to compute and combine the impacts from several hazards. In this first study making use of the API, we calculate global probabilistic economic impacts for tropical cyclones, river floods and reduced crop yields for historical data, as well as for future time steps based on the RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 climate scenarios. From these hazard sets, we compute probabilistic annual impact sets for each hazard. In the case that impacts are provided on an event-base and not on a yearly basis, the probabilistic annual impact sets are created by randomly sampling the number of events per year following a Poisson distribution. From the impact sets per hazard, we finally quantify the total combined cost in a same year and grid cell in order to investigate temporal and spatial correlations of the different hazards.