Quantifying direct and indirect costs of climate-related hazards
Already in the present climate, extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones, floods, wildfires, and droughts place a huge burden on societies, and these events are projected to intensify under future warming. In QUIDIC, we assess past and future socio-economic impacts of (compounding) extreme weather events. Starting from process-based impact simulations within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP, www.isimip.org), we capture the full impact modeling chain from biophysical impact indicators, over direct damages, to the spreading of indirect losses in the global supply-chain network and distributional effects. By constraining our biophysical impact simulations with observations of an extended past period, we develop a better understanding of the impacts that can be attributed to past climate variability and of the role of other direct human influences. We further combine hazard- and socio-economic indicators with reported direct economic damages to develop empirical, event-based economic damage functions. These functions are a powerful tool to systematically attribute historical variations in reported damages over time and to provide damage estimates for different climate and socio-economic futures. In addition, we use the direct damages as input for the global supply-chain model Acclimate, which dynamically calculates the cascading of trade-related losses in the global supply-chain network. We use the full impact modeling chain to analyze distributional effects and to identify hot-spot countries with high socio-economic risks.
Institutions: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) 
Contact: Katja Frieler, Christian Otto, Matthias Mengel