European Extreme Events Climate Index (E3CI)

The European Extreme Events Climate Index (E3CI) is an innovative climate service (operational since January 2021) to assess the frequency and severity of weather-induced hazards over Europe. This service has been funded by Foundation Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for Human Development (IFAB) and developed through the collaboration between Fondazione CMCC Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) and Leithà Unipol Group. Specifically, E3CI proposes to define a synthetic index aimed at providing information about the areas affected by different types of weather-induced hazards and the significance of such events. At this stage, E3CI permits equipping Europe, SADC (Southern African Development Community) and North America with an index similar to Actuaries Climate Index, (NA-ACI; actuariesclimateindex.org) developed over North America and already fully operational. 

From a methodological point of view, using ERA5 reanalysis data (Hersbach et al., 2020), E3CI permits evaluating seven main dynamics: cold and heat stresses, droughts, extreme precipitation, winds, the predisposing conditions leading to hail events and forest fire. Furthermore, five E3CI components are tested using a subset of regional climate projections from the EURO-CORDEX (Jacob et al., 2014, 2020; Giorgi and Gutowski, 2015) program at the highest available resolution (about 11 km) considering three different future periods (2011-2040; 2041-2070; 2017-2100) and three different concentration scenarios. The data are aggregated at different Administrative unit levels and combined into a single index providing an overall view for the domain and period of interest. A key aspect of E3CI is the standardization of the different components over a reference thirty-year period (1981-2010). It is a key aspect of the process because it makes comparable the outputs returned according to different approaches and for different issues; it can limit, in a way, also the influence of potential weaknesses affecting the original datasets used for computation. 

E3CI applications range in a wide area comprising both scientific and technical use cases. Such information can be useful to adjust rate adequacy levels, improve budgeting capabilities and risk management, designing index-linked financial instruments and new insurance and reinsurance products. In addition, E3CI can be adopted to pursue education and sustainability targets, such as to increase awareness about climate change impacts, to support public decision-making processes for sustainable development, to provide a scientifically-sounding measure to monitor climate trends. Finally, this service can change the way financial and insurance markets operate by providing indices that allow to more accurately measure risks related to extreme weather conditions.