Research advancements for impact chain based climate risk and vulnerability assessments

Abstract

As the climate crisis continues to worsen, there is an increasing demand for scientific evidence from Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (CRVA). We present 12 methodological advancements to the Impact Chain-based CRVA (IC-based CRVA) framework, which combines participatory and data-driven approaches to identify and measure climate risks in complex socio-ecological systems. The advancements improve the framework along five axes, including the existing workflow, stakeholder engagement, uncertainty management, socio-economic scenario modeling, and transboundary climate risk examination. Eleven case studies were conducted and evaluated to produce these advancements. Our paper addresses two key research questions: (a) How can the IC-based CRVA framework be methodologically advanced to produce more accurate and insightful results? and (b) How effectively can the framework be applied in research and policy domains that it was not initially designed for? We propose methodological advancements to capture dynamics between risk factors, to resolve contradictory worldviews, and to maintain consistency between Impact Chains across policy scales. We suggest using scenario-planning techniques and integrating uncertainties via Probability Density Functions and Reverse Geometric Aggregation. Our research examines the applicability of IC-based CRVAs to address transboundary climate risks and integrating macro-economic models to reflect possible future socio-economic exposure. Our findings demonstrate that the modular structure of IC-based CRVA allows for the integration of various methodological advancements, and further advancements are possible to better assess complex climate risks and improve adaptation decision-making.

The role of tailored climate scenario information for the perceived legitimacy of climate policy paths

“…4.4). Here, we aggregated the individual factors with equal weights as has been done in several studies (Zhang et al, 2019), although finding locally relevant weights for the factors is advisable, and advanced approaches for estimating climate vulnerability are suggested to use reverse weighted geometric aggregation (Petutschnig et al, 2023).…”

Economic Impacts of Exemplary Climate Change and Adaptation Effects Under Different Socio-Economic Developments in Germany

“…Although the IC framework has been widely used for risk assessments, there are still methodological gaps for further development as the integration of dynamic elements and quantitative models [18]. For an overview of the IC methods and the other case studies within the project see Petutschnig et al [19]. This paper extends this methodology by showing how quantitative and qualitative data can be better integrated for assessment of uncertainties, how an integrated assessment of the impacts of potential climatic and societal changes can be conducted, and how the quasistatic IC approach can be combined with ex ante simulations.…”

Think global—act local: the challenge of producing actionable knowledge on transboundary climate risks at the sub-national level of governance

“…The first three are by nature highly participative, whereas the latter five are highly operational (Fritzsche et al, 2014). For a detailed presentation and discussion of the seven stages, see Petutschnig et al (2023) in this special collection. When applying this framework to the three cases, we used an adapted version of the protocol developed by Harris et al (2022) for assessing transboundary climate risk in case-study research.…”