Decadal Climate Risk Prediction to Inform Social Science Data Collection

Recent advances in climate prediction, informed by large ensemble simulations, allow estimating probabilities of future climate extreme occurrences up to a decade in advance. This offers opportunities to assess decadal climate predictions with societal impacts in mind. However, explicit assessment of the societal impacts of decadal climate extreme predictions is rare. To address this gap, we propose a framework to bridge between climate prediction sciences and rare-event social research. Following the IPCC risk framework that establishes risk as a combination of hazard, vulnerability and exposure, we construct decadal predictions of climate risks that inform the selection of regions of particular high risk for social science data collection of pre- and post- processes. Here, we demonstrate this framework with a study on predicted decadal extreme summer temperature intensifications and urban governance.

As a first step, we target a robust integration of risk assessment into our prediction analysis. We integrate decadal hazard predictions of hot summer temperature increase with social vulnerability to this predicted hazard and population density exposure data, assuming vulnerability and exposure to be static at 2020 levels. This approach leads to a decadal risk forecast that explicitely incorporates societal factors in the predicted index. For the period 2021 to 2030, we find robust prediction of relevant hot summer risk in multiple regions: Ethiopia, Northern India-Pakistan-Afghanistan, as well as Caucasia.

As a next step, we collect data on discourse and perception of climate extremes in major cities in these regions by repeatedly crawling websites from at-risk and control actors to analyze impacts of hot summers on societal field dynamics. This lays the groundwork for selection of comparable regions where climate extremes may influence social systems, enabling a more robust methodology for tracing causal impacts from the natural into the social system.