Risk-based approach to assessing climate impacts

Abstract

In recent years, the frequency of catastrophic natural disasters worldwide has brought to the fore the possibility that these could be the result of changes in the global climate conditions. It is further anticipated that by the end of this century the occurrence of natural disasters will intensify, rendering regions such as Africa more vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate. In this paper, we develop a framework for risk assessment associated with the phenomenon of climate change. We delve into what we mean by ‘risk’, and into statistical techniques that build probabilistic models to capture the behaviour of rare events. These models are aimed at providing reliable and quantifiable estimates of the parameters associated with the occurrence of risk events, which can be used to quantify, in probabilistic terms, their future patterns. Thus, such models provide a means of attaching a value to the risk event of concern, which can be helpful for prioritizing intervention strategies. We discuss risk assessment methods within the context of climate change in five selected southern African domains, namely, coastal infrastructure, west coast fisheries, ground water recharge, wildfires and climate regulation services provided by terrestrial ecosystems. We perform a quantitative risk assessment on the sea-level data from a specific location on the Durban coast as a case study for illustration purposes