Extreme weather and climate events can disrupt many aspects of human societies, including physical and mental health, livelihoods, food and water service, infrastructure, and human mobility. Yet these impacts are still often assessed one hazard at a time, even though severe consequences frequently arise from interacting hazards. Compound events may involve concurrent, sequential, spatially connected, or preconditioned hazards, and their impacts can be nonlinear, cascading, and greater than the sum of impacts associated with individual hazards.

This session focuses on the impacts of compound weather and climate events on human societies. We welcome research on diverse types of compound events, including, but not limited to, heat and drought; drought followed by wildfire; extreme heat combined with wildfire; tropical cyclones accompanied or followed by extreme rainfall, flooding, and storm surge; and rapid transitions between opposing climate extremes. Contributions may examine mortality and morbidity, mental health, migration and displacement, food and water insecurity, livelihood losses and financial security, health-system burdens, infrastructure failure, conflict, and structural inequality. We particularly encourage work addressing unequal exposure, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, resilience, and recovery.

This session welcomes empirical, modelling, qualitative, participatory, and mixed-methods studies at any spatial scale. Relevant topics include definitions and metrics; detection and attribution; historical trends and future projections; evidence linking compound events to human outcomes; causal inference and uncertainty assessment; integration of climate data with administrative records, surveys, remote sensing, and community knowledge; and applications to early warning, anticipatory action, adaptation, preparedness, risk communication, and equitable risk reduction.

By bringing together climate and Earth-system science, epidemiology, public health, geography, economics, sociology, demography, engineering, disaster-risk research, and public policy and practice, the session aims to advance knowledge of how compound events are anticipated, measured, experienced, and managed.