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  • Perspective
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Future climate risk from compound events

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 469–477 (2018)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 20 June 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

Floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts often result from a combination of interacting physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of processes (climate drivers and hazards) leading to a significant impact is referred to as a ‘compound event’. Traditional risk assessment methods typically only consider one driver and/or hazard at a time, potentially leading to underestimation of risk, as the processes that cause extreme events often interact and are spatially and/or temporally dependent. Here we show how a better understanding of compound events may improve projections of potential high-impact events, and can provide a bridge between climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers, who need to work closely together to understand these complex events.

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Fig. 1: Extended risk framework.
Fig. 2: Distribution of climatic drivers and associated hazards.
Fig. 3: Illustration of different possibilities to simulate potentially critical events.

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Change history

  • 20 June 2018

    In the version of this Perspective originally published, the names of the authors of reference 13 were presented incorrectly, with their first names in place of their last names; this has been corrected accordingly to read: “Diakakis, M., Deligiannakis, G., Katsetsiadou, K. & Lekkas, E.”.

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Acknowledgements

Many ideas laid out in this paper emerged from a workshop ‘Addressing the challenge of compound events’ held in April 2017 at ETH Zurich. This workshop has also led to the recently approved EU COST Action DAMOCLES (CA17109). DAMOCLES will coordinate research activities laid out in this Perspective. We thank E. Fischer for presenting the initial idea that has led to Fig. 2 during the workshop. The workshop would not have been possible without generous funding from the World Climate Research Programme, the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Climate System Science (ARCCSS), ETH Zurich, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (VIDI grant no. 016.161.324). The funding was primarily used to invite promising Early Career Scientists working on compound events to attend the workshop. S.W. was supported by ARC Discovery project DP150100411. B.J.J.M.v.d.H. acknowledges funding from the IMPREX research project supported by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Framework programme with grant no. 641811. S.I.S. acknowledges the European Research Council (ERC) DROUGHT-HEAT project funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme with grant no. 617518. This work contributes to the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Grand Challenge on Extremes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jakob Zscheischler & Sonia I. Seneviratne

  2. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Seth Westra & Michael Leonard

  3. Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, The Netherlands

    Bart J. J. M. van den Hurk

  4. Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Bart J. J. M. van den Hurk & Philip J. Ward

  5. Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Climate Extremes and Climate Change Research Center, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Andy Pitman

  6. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amir AghaKouchak

  7. Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    David N. Bresch

  8. Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, Zurich, Switzerland

    David N. Bresch

  9. Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering and National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Thomas Wahl

  10. Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Xuebin Zhang

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Contributions

The article is a result of a workshop organized by J.Z., S.W., B.J.J.M.v.d.H., P.J.W., A.P. and S.I.S. Figure 1 and the definition of compound weather/climate events were created during the workshop. J.Z. wrote the first draft with input from S.W., B.J.J.M.v.d.H., S.I.S., P.J.W. and A.P. J.Z. created Figs. 2 and 3 with input from S.W. and S.I.S. All authors discussed the content of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jakob Zscheischler.

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Zscheischler, J., Westra, S., van den Hurk, B.J.J.M. et al. Future climate risk from compound events. Nature Clim Change 8, 469–477 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0156-3

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