Supporting regional climate risk assessments with the CLIMAAX Handbook

The EU Horizon Europe project CLIMAAX (CLIMAte risk and vulnerability Assessment framework and toolboX) provides financial, analytical and practical support to European regions looking to develop their Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) and management plans. More than sixty regions have been conducting CRAs within the project following a comprehensive online handbook developed by the project. An open-source approach, complemented by a community of practice, aims to democratise access to CRA resources and supports the sharing of experience among practitioners.

The CLIMAAX Handbook encompasses:

• the CLIMAAX Framework, a structured approach to conducting a multi-hazard CRA that supports improved coherence across (EU) countries and regions;
• a toolbox with workflows and examples, offering a starting point for regions to access hazard, exposure and vulnerability information and combine them into a quantitative risk assessment; and
• supporting resources, including information on technical requirements, guidance on the selection of climate model data and scenarios, dataset availability, and support offerings.

The Handbook aims to harmonise the practice of CRA across Europe while allowing for the inclusion of local knowledge to ensure regional relevance. Emphasis is placed on stakeholder engagement and the prioritisation of multiple climate hazards in a key risk assessment step. The Handbook contains workflows that create a quantitative foundation for the analysis of risk, implemented as Jupyter notebooks and based on established Python data processing libraries. These workflows allow users to retrieve, process, and visualise hazard, exposure, and vulnerability data and combine them into indicators of risk. Access to European- and global-scale datasets from open data providers is preconfigured for seven hazards (floods, heavy rainfall, heatwaves, drought, wildfire, snow, and wind) and various types of non-climatic information, e.g., on population and infrastructure. Users are encouraged to integrate their own regional data to further refine the analysis and bridge the gap between the large and the local scale.

We introduce the CLIMAAX Handbook, discuss the project’s operationalisation strategy, reflect on the challenges involved in making the Handbook relevant and accessible to CRA practitioners, and illustrate how we collaborate with participating regions to share their experiences in applying it.