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[Debris blocks a road in Keaton Beach, Florida, after the landfall of Hurricane Helene. Courtesy: Florida National Guard]
Developing a global, event-based, rapid impact attribution framework
Advancing the field of event impact attribution will improve our understanding of the true costs of climate change. While hundreds of hazard attribution studies have shown how extreme weather events are becoming more intense around the world, how these changes translate to greater impacts is still not well understood.
Extreme event impact attribution combines information from hazard attribution with socio-economic impact data to quantify how much climate change increases damage caused by extreme weather events. For example, impact attribution studies can estimate how much more expensive a storm has become, or how many more lives have been lost in a heatwave because of human-made climate change.
Today, the global extent of climate loss and damage remains unclear. Impact attribution is an important step towards understanding the costs of climate change around the world. By increasing awareness of these findings, we want to demonstrate that climate change is making life more dangerous and more expensive.
The Climate Damage Tracker
The Climate Damage Tracker aims to create a global and rapid event impact attribution framework. It will allow us to deliver close to real-time estimates of how climate change has influenced the impacts of specific extreme weather events.
Current areas of focus:
- Attribution of economic damages from tropical cyclones. Find our more about the work here
- Attribution of health impacts from heat waves (in development)
- Subnational exposure and vulnerability data (in development)
We are continuously expanding our framework to include more types of impacts and extreme weather events. If you are interested in contributing to the project or learning more, please do not hesitate to reach out by contacting Emily Theokritoff at e.theokritoff@imperial.ac.uk.