Europe’s Exposure-At-Risk: Comprehensive multi-risk assessments from climate to catastrophe in tourism, finance, agriculture and other sectors

Europe faces a variety of different natural hazards both from its natural state as well as from a changing climate. Dozens of different perils affect European societies and businesses every year. In addition, some of these perils also overlap in space and time demanding additional resilience from affected communities. Unsurprisingly, there have been many different undertakings to quantify Europe’s hazards and risks. However, there is no comprehensive aggregation of all those hazards and how they potentially interact with each other. Within the MYRIAD-EU Horizon 2020 project, we have developed an extensive collection and assessment of open hazard models for Europe and aggregated their results in the context of various exposures like population, GDP and sectoral data like tourism expenditure or capital stock.

This collection of overlapping European “exposure-at-risk” provides an unique and holistic perspective into the occurrence of natural disasters, from all kinds of climate risk indicators for today and the upcoming decades to physical risks likes earthquakes, sea level rise, storms, wildfires and many more. It combines both probabilistic and stochastic assessments and thus can provide multi-hazard and multi-risk interactions for any place in Europe.

The comprehensive representation of natural and climate change-related hazards has been combined with an extensive collection of exposure for the sectors of finance, infrastructure and energy, agriculture and tourism as well as ecosystems and cross-sectoral metrics on an A21 level. Each of these systems comes with respective vulnerability equations. Risk can be evaluated on a probabilistic or deterministic basis. Deterministic scenarios both stem from historic and stochastic model depending on the assessed peril.

In summary, we showcase a database and toolbox to assess historic, deterministic and probabilistic metrics on a single- and multi-risk basis for all of Europe using integrated results on a NUTS3 level and at other spatial levels.