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Name: Marie Ekstrom
Talk Title: Capturing elements of weather-related risks in a climate change context
Abstract: Climate risk and resilience are two terms that go hand-in-hand. The first must be quantified and characterised so that the latter can be achieved for a business, a community, an infrastructure asset or an ecosystem function or service. The requirement to assess climate risk is now well established in the United Kingdom, an integral part of e.g., planning/regulation policy, service agreements, or adhering to industry standards.
Current terminology and praxis used to assess climate risk is strongly shaped by experiences in the disaster risk management community. The hazard, or extreme weather event, sits squarely in the centre of the risk framework, as the need to assess risk only arise when we expect the occurrence of a hazard. The full appreciation, or relevance, of the hazard becomes apparent only when evaluated together with its companion elements: exposure and vulnerability. The former often (in a climate change context) referring to the spatial footprint of the hazard, and the latter characteristics of the receptor that act to enhance or reduce the impact of the hazard. In climate change science, several disciplines act to evolve our understanding of each element.
This multi-disciplinary space, in combination with the adoption of a risk framework evolved primarily for disaster management makes for a rich learning environment, but it is a difficult space for practitioners to navigate because there is much discussion on how to quantify and capture each of those three risk elements for multi-decadal time frames. In this talk we will explore, with examples, some of these difficulties, highlighting the need for innovation in how climate risk can be meaningfully captured in risk assessments and associated metrics.
This talk is an invited talk at EVA 2021. View the programme here.