Parallel Session 3:
Assessment of Changing Global Climate Risks and Their Impacts on Flooding

Concept note

Due to ongoing global warming, record-breaking rainfall events and devastating flood disasters (e.g., 2021 floods in Germany and China) frequently occur around the world. Increasing demands for social resilience and adaptation measures for flood disaster risk and damage reduction require prompt, reliable, and quantitative climate risk assessment. Statistical analysis of global climate models (GCM) projections and their downscaling have paved the path to quantify climate change risks under different global warming scenarios. The recent development of large ensemble climate projections, e.g., d4PDF (Japan), UKCP18 (UK), ClimEx (Canada), MPI-GE (Germany), and CORDEX, provides tools to assess climate risks for rare events with less uncertainty. These experiments have extended the horizon of climate change risk assessment of natural hazards, flood impacts, agriculture and food security, and climate adaptation policies. This session will discuss recent advances in conventional and large ensemble climate projections and their applications to assess climate change impacts on future flood risks.

Session topics

1) Assessment of climate change impact on heavy rainfall, flood events, and uncertainty

Keywords; extremes, downscaling, ensemble, bias, uncertainty, atmospheric moisture pathway, storyline approach

2) Climate change adaptation, risk assessment, and implications for decision makers

Keywords: adaptation opportunity/constraints/planning/implementation, human settlements/security/well-being, climate resilience