Integrating impacts into weather and climate services

The loss burden due to more intense and more frequent weather and climate events is increasing worldwide and causing casualties, economic damages and other adverse societal impacts. To mitigate these consequences and to support better informed decisions and therefore improved actions and responses, many National Hydrological and Meteorological Services are starting to provide services for weather and climate impacts as part of their operational routines. This requires National Hydrological and Meteorological Services to take a risk perspective, that in addition to the hazard-only perspective considers the potential for a given hazard event to inflict adverse consequences on society and attempts to quantify the uncertainties involved. We refer to impacts as the consequences of realised risks on natural and human systems. Risks result from dynamic interactions between weather- or climate-related hazards with the exposure (e.g. infrastructure, persons) and vulnerability of the affected human or ecological system to the hazards.

What are the consequences of such a change in perspective? Here we present our findings on this topic as an outcome of a working group on risks and impacts across three National Hydrological and Meteorological Services. We summarize the relevant strategic, methodological and technical steps and propose recommendations for the development and provision of impact-focused services at National Hydrological and Meteorological Services. In particular, we advocate for the use of one single framework, i.e., a fully fledged risk or hazard-exposure-vulnerability (HEV) setup operated at a National Hydrological and Meteorological Service. We show how such a framework integrates all existing forecast and prospective impact services and allows for flexible future extension driven by the evolving collaboration with partners, stakeholders and users.