Using a New Inventory of Extreme Weather Events to Understand Changing Risks: Implications for Future Climate Resilience

Changing patterns of extreme weather are among the most visible effects of climate change, and the earliest to appear. There is a vast array of stakeholders, from public to policy-makers, with vested interests in understanding the nature and magnitude of these changes. Attribution science arose as a way of providing these stakeholders with accessible, useful and reliable information, and as the science continues to develop, ever-increasing emphasis is being put on the requirements of the end user. In particular, this suggests a need for greater focus on the extent to which the actual impacts of extreme weather can be attributed to climate change; how risks are changing, rather than simply event likelihoods. This view is more informative for policy-makers, makes liability more evident for civil society, and is simply a more accessible form of data. To this end, attribution analyses that provide impact-based information have become more common, and a recent pathfinder report commissioned by the New-Zealand government made an estimate of the attributable cost of extreme weather for NZ over the past decade using a simple probabilistic approach. Given these advances in the literature and increasingly well-established multi-method frameworks for attribution statements, it is concluded that the time is ripe for a more comprehensive study of the impacts that can be directly attributed to anthropogenic climate change. The UK is an obvious area to test this concept, thanks to the wealth of existing event attribution literature, high availability of meteorological data and range of geographically specific, high-resolution impact models that can accurately reproduce meteorological hazards such as flooding.