The current climate change has been shown to exacerbate extreme weather events, such as storms with exceptionally strong winds, hurricanes and medicanes, prolonged temperature extremes, heavy rainfall and flooding. Climate scenarios predict an intensification and increased frequency of these extremes that, in addition to endangering people's health and lives, can have destructive impacts on human activities. Not surprisingly, the United Nations states that 'extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape of the 21st century' (McClean, 2020). In this context, disaster prevention, risk reduction, and adaptation to climate change impacts have become imperative requirements for our society.
Among the most impacted consequences are the deterioration, loss of functionality, or even structural damage to buildings and infrastructures crucial to society, such as health centers, transport infrastructure, energy production and distribution, manufacturing sites, and government buildings. These infrastructures play a crucial role in socio-economic activities and are particularly susceptible to weather stress as they are built to have a long lifespan; damage to these infrastructures has a particularly important impact on society as a whole. Still, the progress in adaptation planning of such critical assets remains low. This can be ascribed also to the lack of reliable numerical models to determine meteorological stressors from extreme events, and tools that actionably predict structural damage.
Addressing these complex challenges necessarily requires interdisciplinary work between experts from climate and atmospheric science, materials and structural analysts, social and economic science, who are the primary focus of this session. The aim is to bring together and present in an integrated manner the latest research advances in the assessment, mitigation and adaptation of risk associated with extreme events for assets. The session encompasses various topics including modelling and quantification of meteorological stresses with numerical or experimental techniques; risk assessment of extreme events; assessment of social, cultural and economic impacts on society. The session emphasizes methodologies for determining meteorological exposures of assets, forecasts of near future extreme events impacts, operational models for damage and structural stability of infrastructures, and analysis of direct and indirect socio-economic cascading damages.