Integrating Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction for Decision-Relevant Climate Risk Assessment

Decision-makers depend on climate projections and information on extreme weather to assess and manage complex climate risks. While physical climate science has made substantial progress in characterising changes in hazards, translating this information into effective adaptation and risk reduction strategies remains challenging. A key reason is that climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR) are often addressed through separate analytical frameworks, despite the fact that real-world climate risk emerges from their combined influence on hazards, vulnerability, and exposure.

Addressing long-term climate change risks while simultaneously managing short-term risks from extreme and compound events requires integrated approaches that move beyond hazard-centred assessments. Climate risks are shaped by dynamic interactions between multiple hazards, evolving vulnerability, and exposure patterns that are highly context-specific. Understanding these interactions is essential for producing climate risk information that is meaningful for decision-making across spatial and temporal scales.

This presentation explores how interdisciplinary approaches can support more decision-relevant climate risk assessments by combining insights from physical climate science, disaster risk management, and social science. It highlights the need for both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, and for the integration of quantitative and qualitative evidence, to better capture adaptation, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability dynamics in climate risk analysis.

Examples are drawn from recent efforts to improve the representation of adaptation in climate impact assessments, including the use of global proxy indicators of adaptive capacity, as well as from bottom-up research that reveals how actors on the ground understand and respond to risks arising from multiple interacting hazards. The presentation also discusses the role of emerging data sources, such as Earth Observation, in identifying vulnerable populations in data-scarce regions and supporting more equitable targeting of adaptation and risk reduction efforts.

Together, these perspectives highlight the importance of integrated, interdisciplinary approaches for producing climate risk information that is meaningful across policy and practice.