Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Climate change impacts on society
Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction
(UN, 2015), which has been endorsed by the EU and
the EEA member and cooperating countries, requires
structured evaluation, recording and sharing of data
about economic impacts of natural hazards and
disasters. The Framework entails a target of reducing
direct disaster economic losses in relation to global
GDP by 2030 compared with 2005–2015 baselines. In
parallel, the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism
(EU, 2013) compels the EU Member States to conduct
risk assessments, and where possible also in economic
terms, at national or appropriate sub-national level. For
both purposes, the JRC is developing loss indicators that
should be part of operational disaster loss databases
(De Groeve et al., 2013, 2014; JRC, 2015).
The EU strategy on adaptation to climate change
(EC, 2013) has called for better informed decision‐making
through, among other things, improved damage and risk
assessment and a thorough assessment of adaptation
costs and benefits. The adaptation strategies that are
to be developed by Member States ought to be closely
connected to disaster risk management plans and
actions.
Indicator selection
The subsequent parts of this section present information
on the following indicator: economic losses from
climate‐related extremes.
A review is also presented of data sources on the
number of climate extremes for which economic and/or
human impacts have been recorded. This information is
provided primarily to contextualise information on the
above-mentioned indicator, and it is not presented in
indicator format.
Information on environmental, health and social impacts
is also presented in various other parts of the report,
e.g. in Section 4.4.6 (forest fires), Section 5.2 (health risks
of climate extremes), Section 5.3.4 (effect of climate
extremes on agricultural yield) and Section 6.2 (exposure
to multiple climatic hazards).
Data quality and data needs
Europe-wide assessments of natural disasters and their
impacts rely on global databases, in particular EM‐DAT
from CRED ( 71 ), the Dartmouth Flood Observatory
(DFO) ( 72 ) and NatCatSERVICE of Munich RE ( 73 ). The
databases are compiled from various sources; the
differences in definitions, thresholds, classification
criteria, reporting approaches, etc., are to be taken into
account when interpreting the data. In general, larger
disasters are captured well in these databases. However,
they are less accurate for smaller events, which still may
have a significant impact (WHO and PHE, 2013).
DFO considers only flood events or natural hazards
where flooding has happened. Information for Europe
on all types of natural hazards can be extracted
from global disaster databases, such as the EM-DAT
database, which places a particular focus on human
fatalities and displaced and affected people, and
the NatCatSERVICE database, which provides more
comprehensive data on insured and overall losses.
The 'disaster thresholds' for an event to be included in
these global databases are as follows:
• EM-DAT: 10 or more people killed and/or 100 or
more people affected and/or declaration of a state of
emergency and/or call for international assistance;
• NatCatSERVICE: small-scale property damage and/
or one fatality. In addition, Munich RE uses different
classes to classify the events.
Over recent years, these global databases have
been harmonised and better coordinated, but some
differences remain and, although during the past
decades both databases have improved their reporting,
caution is still needed in formulating conclusions about
observed changes. In addition, both databases are less
suitable for analysing the impacts of smaller events or
for analyses at the sub-national level. However, despite
these considerations, both databases serve as a good
starting point for getting an overview of the human
impacts and economic costs of disasters in Europe.
The economic loss records reviewed in Section 5.1.3
have been converted to euros (2013 value). For the
purpose of cross-country comparison, the loss records
have been normalised using the Eurostat collection
of economic indicators. Data from earlier years have
been completed from the annual macro-economic
database of the European Commission (AMECO), the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic
Outlook (WEO), the Total Economy Database (TED), and
the World Bank's database ( 74 ).
( 71 ) http://www.emdat.be.
( 72 ) http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu.
( 73 ) http://www.munichre.com/en/reinsurance/business/non-life/georisks/natcatservice/default.aspx.
( 74 ) See http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/db_indicators/ameco/index_en.htm (AMECO), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/02/
weodata/index.aspx (WEO), https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/ (TED) and http://data.worldbank.org (World Bank's
database).
Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report
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