A transdisciplinary chain to assess the risk of direct and indirect impacts linked to extreme climate events from regional to local scale

Climate change is causing increased risks linked to extreme weather events. In order to develop effective adaptation strategies and policies, there is an urgent need for methodologies able to assess how the socio-economic risks associated with extreme climate-related events will change in the coming decades especially at local scale. The development of these methodologies require the expertise from many different scientific disciplines, including: modelling of global and local climatic phenomena, assessment of the intensity and probability of extreme events, representation of their impacts on the society and quantification of the associated risk.

In this work we propose a methodological chain linking the risk of extreme events in a changing climate with both direct and indirect impacts on the socio-economic sector from regional to local scale. The proposed chain integrates the knowledge of three scientific fields: climatologists, engineers and macro-economist. Here, we present agreements and differences between communities (e.g., aim, terminology, methodology, etc.), and evaluate advantages and constrains of the combined used of high-resolution regional climate models, engineering risk assessment models and economic input-output models compared to the state of the art in this field.

To illustrate the advantages of the proposed methodology and its practical feasibility, we present preliminary results from an applied pilot study in the Italian context.