Item talk:Q975

Rationale

Climate change is intensifying risks, resulting from the dynamic interactions between (climate-related) hazards, exposure, and vulnerability. More frequent and severe extreme events, coupled with the increasing complexity of climate risks are cascading effects across sectors and regions, causing widespread impacts on both people and nature. Vulnerable communities and systems are disproportionately affected, with some facing irreversible damage as adaptation limits are exceeded. Structured data on climate risks is essential for understanding these evolving threats, enabling better assessment, response, and adaptation strategies.

Concept methodology

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s (UNDRR) Hazard definition and classification review [1] was used as the building blocks to our Risk taxonomy, due to it's comprehensiveness, legitimacy, and open access. The main adjustment of the UNDRR's classification was replacing "hazard" with a more climate-specific understanding of risk, specifically, the IPCC’s [2] framing of “Risk” being the “potential for adverse consequences” for human or ecological systems, emerging from the dynamic interactions between (climate-related) hazards, exposure, and vulnerability. This provides a framework for understanding the increasingly severe, often irreversible, and interconnected impacts of climate change on human and natural systems, and better reflects the language of climate experts, and climate laws and policies.

Other adjustments were made to make sure it is applicable across our whole dataset, in line with the latest climate discourse [3], accessible to a variety of users, and aligned with our internal style guide, namely:

• Hydrological hazard and meteorological hazard have been renamed to slow onset events and extreme weather [4]
• Environmental degradation has been redefined as environmental risks to specific ecosystems, namely marine risk, terrestrial risk, and cryosphere risk, along with the adverse effects on ecosystem health from air-pollution risk. The framing of risk has been applied here because, while some of these risks involve climate-related hazards, they also depend on the interaction of various environmental and human-induced factors, such as deforestation, making them more appropriately classified as risks.
• Technological hazard, societal hazard, and chemical hazard have been updated to technological impact, societal impact, and chemical impact, as some are more focused on the outcomes of events that have a climate component, and are therefore classed under impacts rather than hazards.
• Biological hazard has been redefined as health impact, though it is not included in this classifier development. A separate taxonomy will be created for climate and health, given the large interest in this subject.
• We have not applied extra-terrestrial hazard to our dataset, as it is not relevant to our climate-centred dataset (e.g. meteor impacts).

References & acknowledgements

We are grateful for the expertise and contributions of Tiffanie Chan and Emily Bradeen at the Grantham Research Institute, as well as Jetske Bonenkamp at Wageningen University and Research. We also acknowledge the building blocks of our taxonomy, namely the extensive research and work of the UNDRR and IPCC in enhancing our understanding of climate risks.

[1] United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). (2020). Hazard definition and classification review: Technical report. Retrieved from https://www.undrr.org/publication/hazard-definition-and-classification-review-technical-report

[2] Reisinger, Andy, Mark Howden, Carolina Vera, et al. (2020). The Concept of Risk in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: A Summary of Cross-Working Group Discussions. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, Switzerland. pp15

[3] Schäfer, L., Jorks, P., Seck, E., Koulibaly, O., & Diouf, A. (2021). Slow-onset processes and resulting loss and damage–An introduction. Bonn: Germanwatch eV, 1-42

[4] United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (2012). Slow Onset Events: Technical paper. FCCC/TP/2012/7. Retrieved from https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2012/tp/07.pdf