From Risk to Resilience: Redefining Multi-Hazard Climate Risk Evaluation by integrating resilience capacity

With increasing frequency and severity of climate risks, communities are urged to systemically strengthen climate resilience. To do so, Climate Risk Assessments (CRA) support identification, assessment and monitoring of climate risks across hazards, geographic areas and socio-economic sectors. Despite broad application and implementation by research, policy and practice CRA, however, have shown limited integration of the resilience component. In Europe - and increasingly globally - climate risks are rarely unmanaged, as they are shaped by existing response capacities and adaptation measures. In our risk evaluation approach, we seek to integrate resilience capacity with quantified climate estimations, requiring translation and interdisciplinary thinking. We argue that by including a resilience perspective from an early adaptation stage onwards supports systemic resilience building.

Within the EU Horizon 2021 project CLIMAAX, we developed a Risk Evaluation Dashboard designed for application at European regional and community levels. The dashboard is embedded in a comprehensive CRA framework and operationalizes climate risk evaluation through three dimensions: Severity, Urgency, and Resilience Capacity. Resilience Capacity is conceptualized as both a generic and a hazard-specific attribute of a region’s ability to anticipate, cope with, and adapt to climate impacts. In this way, vulnerability and response capacity function as interacting modulating factors of resilience capacity rather than as only separate analytical layers for climate risk.

Through user engagement and empirical data collection within the CLIMAAX project, we assess how qualitative insights can complement quantitative risk estimations and feed into adaptation and resilience building. Further, by effectively integrating diverse perspectives, the dashboard aims to innovatively bridge the translation gap between CRA and resilience building with clear entry points for future CRM endeavors.