ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes’ Post

Look forward to diving in and love the framing around planetary solvency. Powerful when more than half of our global economy is dependent on nature & its ecosystem services. From IFoA: “Just as financial solvency assessments assess the ability of a financial entity to pay claims, Planetary Solvency would combine nature, climate, and societal risk assessments to assess risks to the ecosystem services that underpin our society, both now and in the future.”

UB experts, grad students contribute to NYS climate change report! Recently, over 200 contributors - including University at Buffalo faculty, researchers, and graduate students - helped to create a Climate Impact Assessment for New York State in an effort to enable decision-makers at all levels—from individual residents, businesses, and landowners to municipal and state government—to better understand the impacts of climate change and make informed choices about how to prepare for them. The Resilient Buildings Lab was a major #UBuffalo contributor in creating this resource. "The Resilient Buildings Lab was proud to partner with New York State on the Climate Impacts Assessment,” Nicholas B. Rajkovich PhD, AIA, CPHC says. “The state is taking an innovative approach to helping people better understand the many ways in which a changing climate will impact them in the decades to come. More importantly, the assessment provides guidance on how residents, business owners and government officials can prepare for climate change now.” Read the full impact assessment below: https://lnkd.in/ezkqExpq

We are excited to share with our readers and followers our first peer-reviewed research publication - ‘Projecting future tropical cyclone frequencies by combining uncertain empirical estimates of baseline frequencies with climate model estimates of change’ - which has been authored by Steve Jewson, PhD, Lambda Climate Research Ltd. Here is what Stephen said about his research:   “A lot of climate change information is presented as changes relative to some baseline. In that case, folk who want information about actual future climate, for impact modelling, first need to estimate the baseline and then need to add on the changes. The uncertainty around the future climate is the sum of the uncertainties. Often, the bigger of the two uncertainties is the uncertainty around the baseline climate, rather than the uncertainty around the change.   This paper works through the details of this idea for projections of future TC numbers, deriving the necessary equations and combining estimates of baseline with estimates of change. For near term climate, the baseline uncertainty generally exceeds the climate change uncertainty. In other words: the main reason we don't know what the frequency of TCs will be in 10 years' time is that we don't know what the frequency of TCs is today. At some point, the climate change uncertainty overtakes, but for some basins that's not until the 2050s or so, especially for the number of major storms.   #TLDR? Stephen summarised the research here: “When you see information about changes in climate, with uncertainty, don't forget you need to add on extra uncertainty to account for baseline uncertainty. If you leave that out, you might be missing the most important piece of the puzzle.” The paper is #DiamondOpenAccess and is therefore free to read and download. ‘Projecting future tropical cyclone frequencies by combining uncertain empirical estimates of baseline frequencies with climate model estimates of change’ is available to read here: https://lnkd.in/g9XYpnHV #DiamondOpenAccess #TropicalCyclones #ClimateChange #hurricane #insurance #risk #CatastropheModelling

The impacts of climate change are already beginning to materialise into financial risks. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), climate change-related events over the past five decades have resulted in US$4.3 trillion in reported economic losses. In this report, GIC and S&P Global Sustainable1 analyse the projected increase in physical climate hazards for global real estate properties held by companies in the S&P Global REIT Index and highlight the following takeaways: Physical risks have tangible impacts on real assets. Cumulative projected costs of changing climate physical risk exposure could reach US$536 billion, or 26% of the total real estate asset value of the index, by 2050 under the low (SSP1-2.6) climate change scenario. Under a medium-high climate change scenario (SSP3-7.0), the projected cumulative exposure could reach US$559bn, or 28% of the total real estate asset value of the index, by 2050. As we move beyond mid-century, future climate change scenarios diverge sharply, with climate physical risks becoming significantly more onerous in high warming scenarios compared to low warming scenarios. Regardless of the climate scenario used, the warming that is already embedded in the climate system means that physical risks are likely to increase over time, raising costs across the broader economy for customers, tenants, building operators, owners, and investors. Existing risk assessment models often overlook the impact of adaptation, offering an incomplete picture of actual investment risks from climate events. This omission can lead to an incomplete view of the net costs of physical risks and create challenges for investors in prioritising risk management efforts. Climate change creates opportunities for adaptation solution providers and for asset owners to invest in adaptation. Our study examines some readily available climate adaptation solutions for non-residential real estate, such as green or cool roofs and wet or dry floodproofing, and estimates the annual demand for these solutions to reach approximately US$29bn globally through 2050 (or US$726bn in total). Coupled with strong policy support and timely deployment, these solutions could reduce the costs of climate physical risks. Wet and dry floodproofing, for example, could offset physical hazard costs by US$3.55 for every US$1 invested. https://lnkd.in/gMskw23r

“ a reliance on models that don't account for enough relevant factors and a tendency toward linear thinking have narrowed perceptions of climate change risks.” And what about high-impact high-likelihood risks? Pls see post and link below

How do #adaptation #measures change the assessment of #physical #climate #risk #impacts on assets in a #global #real #estate investment trust ? What an excellent question De Rui Wong Keebum Kim Rick Lord GIC S&P Global

The article and paper will give me something to think about over the weekend. Society is too focused on the expected gradual consequences of climate change and not enough on high-impact, low-likelihood extremes. Germany has had 3 100-year floods in the last 5 years, but is anyone asking how to prepare for the new 100-year flood. What will that even look like? In the paper, the authors outline two questions for climate scientists and society to consider. 1 - what are the high-impact, low-likelihood hazards and irreversible changes that society should worry about, and how can their risks be measured and communicated? 2 - how can scientists identify achievable and safe pathways to a future climate that also meets human needs? The second one is the one that will keep me awake. Human needs – can the problem become part of the solution? First of all, is there a safe pathway other than immediate decarbonisation on the scale of >10% per year for 20 years, then spend any remaining economic capacity on CDR? How is this remotely achievable with the report recently that in the last 6 years we have consumed 75% of the resources that we used for the whole of the 20th century, with no end in sight? How do the other Sustainable Development Goals stand any chance given that to just bring the bottom 50% up to the even the level of the 11-49% will require a four-fold increase in energy demand? Have a good weekend. Article: https://lnkd.in/eaDi-5VG Paper: https://lnkd.in/eFJ5zMQz #climatechange #adaptation #extremes #tippingpoint #society #SDG

It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change. 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”?

🌍 Back to Basics: Understanding Climate Pathways 🌱 Navigating the complexity of climate science is key to building resilience and developing robust strategies for the future. To do this, organizations rely on scenario analysis—a tool that helps assess a range of risks, from the transition risks of rapid decarbonization to the physical impacts of delayed action on emissions. 🔍 What’s the difference between RCP and SSP? At the core of climate scenario analysis are Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). These frameworks work together to paint a clearer picture of the future: - RCPs project greenhouse gas concentration levels, helping us understand possible climate futures. - SSPs take it further by including socioeconomic factors like population growth and economic development, showing how different societal changes could influence climate risks.   The IPCC's 6th Assessment Report (AR6) focuses on five key scenarios, which are typically referred to as SSP-RCP combinations, representing a wide range of possible futures. These scenarios were developed by integrating the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) with various levels of radiative forcing, similar to those in the previous RCP framework, which was primarily used in the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report.   💡 Why does it matter? Scenario analysis is central to climate-related disclosures and strategic planning. At Correntics, our climate risk analytics platform builds upon these frameworks to analyze the vulnerability of our clients' assets, operations, and value chains against climate risks like extreme heat, heavy precipitation, flooding, etc.   Join the conversation! Understanding these pathways is key to navigating climate risks and building a sustainable future. Let us know your experience dealing with these frameworks! 🌊🌡️ #ClimateRisk #Sustainability #Correntics #ClimateScience

Well done, sir, as usual. #clapclapclap "The last decade has seen the rise of what is called storyline attribution, which now dominates discussion of every extreme weather event. A storyline provides a putative causal explanation for the incidence of a particular extreme event that just happened and explains why the event was worse than it otherwise would have been, absent the human influence. (...) A seemingly plausible-sounding storyline for every event is easy to create. I say seemingly because the storyline approach is free to discount parts of the story that don’t advance the narrative, to change the story event by event, and to ignore events that didn’t happen or did not become extreme. A storyline is a story, not science. The storyline approach gained so much attention that the 2017 U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) was compelled to discuss and legitimize the Orwellian phrase “attribution without detection” — which literally means identifying the cause of a change that has not occurred (...)." https://lnkd.in/d7MxexFx