This policy brief highlights the critical need to address the complex and compounding impacts of climate extremes, driven by climate change and non-climate factors, to ensure effective disaster risk management and climate adaptation interventions. The brief provides insights from the COMPASS EU-funded project (2024–2026), which aims to develop advanced methods for attribution of compound climate events and their impacts, offering actionable recommendations for policymakers to mitigate future risks.
Key findings include:
- Compounding and cascading impacts: Climate extremes often interact with other hazards and socio-economic drivers, amplifying their effects. Policies must account for these dynamics to avoid ineffective or harmful interventions.
- Data limitations: High-quality local data on exposure, vulnerability, and impacts are essential for robust impact attribution and policy design. Enhanced data collection and open sharing, particularly in developing regions, should be prioritized.
- Counterfactual and scenario-based approaches: Methods such as counterfactuals and future scenario analysis can “stress test” policy responses, helping to prioritize and optimize interventions to reduce human and economic losses.
- Global-to-local insights: Leveraging both global and local datasets ensures scalable solutions while addressing regional and context-specific vulnerabilities.
By integrating these findings, policymakers can better design and implement interventions that address both climate and non-climate drivers of risk, enhancing resilience and reducing the impacts of future compound climate events. The current brief aims at facilitating the science-to-policy interfacing, and the transfer of the COMPASS experience into the policy and decision-making fields, informing policy and planning around adaptation, loss and damage, or disaster recovery.
More information can be found in the following COMPASS project Deliverable:
Jack, C. D. and Vogel, M. M., (2024): Policy Attribution Brief I. Horizon Europe project COMPASS. Deliverable D7.5.
