Compound extreme events in a warming climate: Implications for climate change adaptation and mitigation

Human-induced climate change is leading to an increase in the intensity and frequency of some severe extreme weather and climate events, including compound extreme events (Seneviratne et al. 2021; Seneviratne et al., in preparation). This presentation will provide an overview of recent literature on this topic in the context of climate projections, as well as in relation to climate adaptation and mitigation. A recent study assessing projected changes in concurrent extreme events at country level at different levels of global warming reveals an increasing probability of near-permanent extreme conditions in most countries of the world with increasing global warming (Batibeniz et al. 2023). An analysis of changes in spatially compounding hot, wet and dry events with increasing greenhouse gas forcing additionally reveals that the spatial extent of top-producing agricultural regions threatened by climate extremes will increase drastically if mean global warming shifts from +1.5 ^∘C to +2.0 ^∘C, and possibly higher levels of global warming (Biess et al. 2024). Some compounding changes also come from the clear increase in the number of extreme events affected by human-induced climate change, as recently shown for heatwaves on global scale (Quilcaille et al. 2025). Further new results highlight how changes in climate extremes and compound events constrain potential future options for climate mitigation and adaptation, and why they need to be integrated in the development of plausible emissions and adaptation scenarios for the coming decades.

 

References:

Batibeniz, F., M. Hauser, and S.I. Seneviratne, 2023: Countries most exposed to individual and concurrent extremes and near-permanent extreme conditions at different global warming levels. Earth Syst. Dynam., 14, 485–505, 2023 https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-14-485-2023

Biess, B., L. Gudmundsson, and S.I. Seneviratne, 2024: Future changes in spatially compounding hot, wet or dry events and their implications for the world’s breadbasket regions. Environ. Res. Lett. 19, 064011, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4619.

Quilcaille, Y., L. Gudmundsson, D.L. Schumacher, T. Gasser, R. Heede, C. Heri, Q. Lejeune, S. Nath, P. Naveau, W. Thiery, C.-F. Schleussner, and S.I. Seneviratne, 2025: Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09450-9.

Seneviratne, S.I., X. Zhang, M. Adnan, W. Badi, C. Dereczynski, A. Di Luca, S. Ghosh, I. Iskandar, J. Kossin, S. Lewis, F. Otto, I. Pinto, M. Satoh, S.M. Vicente-Serrano, M. Wehner, and B. Zhou, 2021: Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate. In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1513–1766, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.013.

Seneviratne, S.I. et al., in preparation: Extreme climate events from past to future: A 5-year update since the IPCC AR6 report. Manuscript in preparation.