Challenges and Opportunities for Understanding Societal Impacts of Climate Extremes

Climate extremes exact a heavy and differential toll on society. Reported economic losses are primarily concentrated in developed economies, whereas reported fatalities occur overwhelmingly in developing economies. Moreover, even at single locations the adverse impacts of extreme climate events are often unequally distributed across the population. Understanding such impacts holds enormous societal and economic value, and is a key step towards climate resilience and adaptation. Recent research advances include improved impact forecasting and enhanced understanding of how the interaction between human and natural systems shapes the impacts of climate extremes. Nonetheless, there are some key challenges that have hindered progress. We focus on three: Limited availability and quality of impact data, difficulties in understanding the processes leading to impacts and lack of reliable impact projections. We argue that newly released datasets and recent methodological and technical advances open a window of opportunity to address several dimensions of these challenges. Notable examples include extracting impact information from textual sources using large language models and developing impact projections using data-driven approaches. Moreover, interdisciplinary collaborations between the social and natural sciences can elucidate processes underlying past climate impacts and enable building storylines of future societal impacts. We call for building momentum in seizing these opportunities for a breakthrough in the study of impacts of climate extremes. Achieving meaningful progress will require interdisciplinary and intersectoral research, and strong collaboration across academic, policy and practitioner communities.