Extreme climate event attribution allows us to assess the relative contribution of human carbon emissions and resulting global climate change to the probability and intensity of climate extremes such as extreme rainfall, wind speeds, and heat. Extreme climate event attribution methods have developed significantly over the past decade with approaches ranging from unconditional correlations with global warming through to strongly conditional perturbed event simulations (Cotterill et al., 2024). The methods focus on the climate change signal: how much humaninduced climate change has altered hazard characteristics such as rainfall intensity, peak wind speed, heat extremes, or storm surge, and how much climate change has altered the probability of such an event occurring. While this analysis is central to event attribution, attribution use case results from the EU HORIZON project COMPASS show that this provides only a partial explanation of real-world impacts.

Across COMPASS use cases – from winter storms in the UK to tropical cyclones in Mozambique and Honduras – our findings show that impact attribution must account as rigorously for socioeconomic drivers as for climate change. Factors such as population growth, economic development, spatial planning, inequality, political fragility, and conflict often shape exposure and vulnerability as much as, or more than, anthropogenic climate change. Evidence from Mozambique and Honduras (Fig. 1) highlights how climate extremes can reinforce cycles of exposure and vulnerability. Ignoring these drivers risks overstating climate change’s role and misdirecting policy interventions away from where they are most urgent and effective.

This Policy Brief argues that policy-relevant climate attribution must integrate the complexity of socio-economic drivers to avoid misleading conclusions, better target adaptation investment, and support resilience strategies that reduce rather than redistribute risk. Attribution that neglects socio-economic complexity can misdiagnose impact drivers or over-emphasize the role of climate change. Integrating exposure and vulnerability into attribution frameworks is essential for producing policy-relevant insights and avoiding maladaptation.

More information can be found in the following COMPASS project Deliverable:
Jack, C. D. (2025): Policy Attribution Brief II: Why socio-economic complexity must be central in the climate attribution of past extreme events. Horizon Europe project COMPASS. Deliverable D7.6