Between 1980 and 2022, weather- and climate-related extremes caused economic losses of assets estimated at EUR 650 billion in the EU. To face this challenge, increasing with ongoing warming and interconnexion of assets, it is necessary to stimulate and coordinate the European effort on disaster risk reduction (DRR), explicitly accounting for the changing socio-environmental conditions. To this aim, innovative holistic and integrative approaches are required including reinforced collaborations between -among others- geosciences, climate sciences, engineering, data and digital sciences, and human and social sciences. These different disciplines are now heavily involved in DRR, but still work too much in silos and / or, sometimes, without direct interaction with society. Grounding on the approach developed in the France 2030 Risks-IRIMA program, we propose a session that emphasizes inter and transdisciplinary methodological approaches of DRR, so as to better detect, quantify and anticipate risks due to weather extremes and climate change. The aim is to understand their impact resulting from extreme events, multiple risks, cascading effects, multi-scale dynamics, etc. in an explicit non–stationary framework able to account for the full complexity at play.
This session also addresses the escalating challenges posed by climate change in arid areas. These regions face intensifying droughts, heatwaves, fires, and occasional unexpected flood events, as recently observed in the Arabian Peninsula. This session welcomes contributions exploring comprehensive strategies focusing on future climate forecasts and innovative practices for both mitigation and adaptation to climatic extremes. Central to the discussion are climate variability and climate change impacts specific to arid environments, emphasizing water-vegetation-climate interactions and their implications for the resilience of ecosystems and society. Participants will delve into the potential and the foreseen impacts of water management practices as well as climate change mitigation practices such as carbon capturing and intensification of renewable energy in arid regions. This session underscores the critical role of drought monitoring systems, weather forecasts and climate projections in supporting the aforementioned practices as well as in predicting and preparing for extreme events that could jeopardize them, informing proactive risk reduction policies.
Innovative and integrated approaches to mitigate risks due to aridity, weather extremes and climate change
Convener:
Gilles Grandjean
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Co-conveners:
Ibrahim Hoteit,
David Yates,
Matteo Zampieri,
Eckert Nicolas