Climate Change Impact Chains: A Review of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities for Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessments

Abstract

Shifting from effect- towards cause-oriented and systemic approaches in sustainable climate change adaptation requires a solid understanding of the climate-related and societal causes behind climate risks. Thus, capturing, systemizing, and prioritizing factors contributing to climate risks are essential for developing cause-oriented climate risk and vulnerability assessments (CRVA). Impact Chains (IC) are conceptual models used to capture hazard, vulnerability and exposure factors that lead to a specific risk. IC modeling includes a participatory stakeholder phase and an operational quantification phase. While ICs are widely implemented to systematically capture risk processes, they still show methodological gaps concerning, e.g., the integration of dynamic feedback or balanced stakeholder involvement. Such gaps usually only become apparent in practical applications, and there is currently no systematic perspective on common challenges and methodological needs. Therefore, we reviewed 47 articles applying IC and similar CRVA methods that consider the cause-effect dynamics governing risk. We provide an overview of common challenges and opportunities as a roadmap for future improvements. We conclude that IC should move from a linear-, to an impact web-like representation of risk to integrate cause-effect dynamics. Qualitative approaches are based on significant stakeholder involvement to capture expert-, place-, and context-specific knowledge. The integration of IC into quantifiable, executable models is still highly underexplored due to a limited understanding of systems, data, evaluation options, and other uncertainties. Ultimately, using IC to capture the underlying, complex processes behind risk supports effective, long-term, and sustainable climate change adaptation.

What's at stake? A human well-being based proposal for assessing risk of loss and damage from climate change

“…While discussions about risk factors and their relationships can be solely based on expert or stakeholder knowledge, quantifying the indicators is heavily reliant on data. The absence of appropriate data has been found to be, to date, a major challenge in the application of the Impact Chain method (Menk et al, 2022). This challenge would be equally present when aiming to populate loss and damage indicators with data.…”

“…The Impact Chain method integrates the IPCC's risk framework and has proven that it can produce relevant and actionable insights for policy-and decision-making and is applicable in a broad range of contexts (Menk et al, 2022;André et al, forthcoming). The loss and damage related results produced by this method would in turn be integrable with comprehensive climate risk management approaches such as those given by Schinko et al (2019) and Hagen et al (forthcoming).…”

Proposing DAPP-MR as a disaster risk management pathways framework for complex, dynamic multi-risk

“…Additionally, interdependencies within an existing system are not only affected by long-term developments, but also by short-term dynamics of e.g. vulnerability characteristics ( Menk et al., 2022 ; de Ruiter and van Loon, 2022 ), effects of institutionalized governance structures and rebound effects in processes of decision making ( Head, 2019 ; Siders and Pierce, 2021 ). In combination with a diverse understanding of interlinkages and interdependencies within systems ( Menk et al., 2022 ; Hochrainer-Stigler et al., 2020 ) above mentioned challenges imply that accounting for dynamics and interdependencies of sectors, also requires diligent consideration of additional sources of (deep) uncertainty.…”

“…The proposed framework proposes a sector-focused stage 2 iteration as the most effortless entry point to integrate complexity. Within sectors, more channels for communication and collaboration might exist facilitating the integration of knowledge and perspectives ( Menk et al., 2022 ). Additionally, as there is growing attention in research to better understand hazard interactions ( Zscheischler et al., 2020 ; Poljansek et al., 2021 ), the proposed framework to create (intermediate-) adaptive pathways for single- or multi-hazard-related planning can already serve as useful information for sectoral users.…”

Assessing agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in European pre-Alpine regions

“…Thus, the expert weighting method benefits by integrating region-specifics that might be missed by the other method. Moreover, this approach guarantees a higher level of involvement of local stakeholders (Menk et al, 2022).…”