Towards a holistic climate service: Addressing all four climate risk determinants

Abstract

This article presents a newly developed climate service designed to monitor climate risk in Norwegian municipalities using a variety of indicators. The service is accessible through a publicly available multimedia platform. With the expected increase in extreme weather events, many climate services have emerged focusing solely on future climate conditions, thus addressing only the hazard component of climate risk. As a result, most current local climate services evaluate how future climate will impact today’s society. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), however, recently developed a risk framework consisting of four determinants: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and response. Following this framework, our climate service incorporates all four risk determinants. It presents geographically and temporally varying indicators expressing current, near-future, and far-future projections or scenarios on hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and maps these against current response levels. This approach enables us to identify which municipalities in Norway are most at risk and currently have the least adequate responses.