Probabilistic Assessment of Future Climate Risks and Adaptation Across European Scenarios

Developing climate-resilient pathways requires an integrated view of risk that combines physical hazards with socio-economic vulnerability and adaptive capacity under future uncertainty. Within the SPARCCLE project, this is achieved by developing a probabilistic climate risk assessment framework for Europe that highlights the highest and recurrent impact patterns of climate extremes, as well as the challenges these pose for adaptation planning.

Building on the core components of risk, namely hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, we integrate the MESMER climate emulator with the CLIMADA risk assessment platform to generate large ensembles of spatially explicit hazard realizations for extreme temperatures under custom emission pathways and global mean temperature trajectories. These hazards are combined with detailed exposure data, focusing on population exposure to extreme heat and accounting for future demographic change. Location-specific socio-economic vulnerabilities, including age structure, gender, and income inequality, are incorporated through hazard-specific impact functions.

The use of a climate emulator enables exploration of a wide range of plausible futures, capturing dominant and recurrent spatiotemporal risk patterns as well as low-probability, high-impact outcomes that are often missed by limited climate model ensembles. This probabilistic framework allows us to identify regional hotspots of risk, assess where adaptation needs are greatest, and explore where adaptation constraints and limits may emerge under different climate and socio-economic pathways, reflecting alternative future challenges for Europe.

Using heat-related impacts as a detailed application, we assess whether projected adaptation efforts are sufficient to close future adaptation gaps across regions and scenarios. The framework is designed to be scalable to multisectoral analyses and to feed into integrated assessment models and decision-support tools. By linking physical hazards, socio-economic vulnerability, and adaptive capacity in a unified probabilistic approach, this work supports forward-looking climate risk management and strengthens Europe’s preparedness for diverse future climate and socioeconomic challenges.