Globally consistent assessment of economic impacts of wildfires in CLIMADA v2.2

Abstract

Abstract. In light of the dramatic increase in economic impacts due to wildfires over recent years, the need for globally consistent impact modelling of wildfire damages is ever increasing. Insurance companies, individual households, humanitarian organizations, governmental authorities, and investors and portfolio owners are increasingly required to account for climate-related physical risks. In response to these societal challenges, we present an extension to the open-source and open-access risk modelling platform CLIMADA (CLImate ADAptation) for modelling economic impacts of wildfires in a globally consistent and spatially explicit approach. All input data are free, public and globally available, ensuring applicability in data-scarce regions of the Global South. The model was calibrated at resolutions of 1, 4 and 10 km using information on past wildfire damage reported by the disaster database EM-DAT. Despite the large remaining uncertainties, the model yields sound damage estimates with a model performance well in line with the results of other natural catastrophe impact models, such as for tropical cyclones. To complement the global perspective of this study, we conducted two case studies on the recent megafires in Chile (2017) and Australia (2020). The model is made available online as part of a Python package, ready for application in practical contexts such as disaster risk assessment, near-real-time impact estimates or physical climate risk disclosure.

A generalized framework for designing open-source natural hazard parametric insurance

“…Natural hazards are described by an intensity parameter which is best representative of potentially incurred damages on exposed entities. Examples of common intensities used for risk estimates are the maximum wind speed for storms (Eberenz et al, 2021;Welker et al, 2021) and the thermal anomaly of fires (Lüthi et al, 2021).…”

“…EM-DAT reports the damages caused by major natural hazard events around the world. These records in combination with the LitPop exposure were used to calibrate impact functions for different natural hazards in CLIMADA (Eberenz et al, 2021;Lüthi et al, 2021). We use the resulting impact functions to compute modeled damages.…”

Rapid increase in the risk of heat-related mortality

“…Heat mortality impacts were calculated using the CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation) platform 19 , available on GitHub at https://github.com/CLIMADA-project/climada_python. CLIMADA is fully open-source and -access and a well established risk model to model impacts of natural catastrophes such as tropical cyclones 54 , flood 55 , windstorms 56 or wildfires 57 . The methodology for heat mortality was adopted from the R based tutorial 46 and translated to python.…”

Extending MESMER-X: A spatially resolved Earth system model emulator for fire weather and soil moisture

“…While we focus here on the emulation of annual average of the soil moisture and the annual minimum of the monthly average of the soil moisture, these variable are related to changes in drought occurrence . Furthermore, fires and soil moisture are both relevant for the assessment of the potential of nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change, such as the use of bio-energy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation (Wang et al, 2014;von Buttlar et al, 2017;Vogel et al, 2019;Lüthi et al, 2021). These variables are thus of high relevance for the further extension of the MESMER-X emulator.…”