Luc Feyen’s research while affiliated with The Joint Commission and other places

Recent extreme wildfires worldwide have raised concerns about the accelerating impacts of climate change. Assessing the socioeconomic impacts of wildfires is challenging due to uncertainties in risk drivers and observational records. Here, we implement a high-resolution data modelling framework to quantify fire season length, population exposure to fire weather, and wildfire economic damage in Europe for a range of global warming scenarios. Climate change is expected to lengthen the fire season across Europe, particularly in southern regions already prone to fire-conducive weather. While the south already faces extended periods of high fire danger, population in central and northern Europe will be increasingly exposed to adverse fire weather conditions. Present direct wildfire damages of €2.4 billion per year could nearly double with warming of 3°C or more. Mediterranean regions will bear the highest economic burden, with annual maximum damages reaching 5–10% of their regional economy. Our findings advocate for stringent climate mitigation, fire-resistant ecosystems, and resilient communities near fire-prone areas.

Since 1950, anthropogenic activities have altered the climate, land cover, soil properties, channel morphologies, and water management in the river basins of Europe. This has resulted in significant changes in hydrological conditions. The availability of consistent estimates of river flow at the global and continental levels is a necessity for assessing changes in the hydrological cycle. To overcome limitations posed by observations (incomplete records, inhomogeneous spatial coverage), we simulate river discharge for Europe for the period 1951–2020 using a state-of-the-art hydrological modelling approach. We use the new European set-up of the OS LISFLOOD model, running at 1 arcmin (≈1.8km) with 6-hourly time steps. The hydrological model is forced by climate reanalysis data (ERA5-Land) that are bias-corrected and downscaled to the model resolution with gridded weather observations. The model also incorporates 72 surface field maps representing catchment morphology, vegetation, soil properties, land use, water demand, lakes, and reservoirs. Inputs related to human activities are evolving through time to emulate societal changes. The resulting Hydrological European ReAnalysis (HERA) provides 6-hourly river discharge for 282 521 river pixels with an upstream area >100km2. We assess its skill using 2448 river gauging stations distributed across Europe. Overall, HERA delivers satisfying results (median KGE′=0.55), despite a general underestimation of observed mean discharges (mean bias=-13.1%), and demonstrates a capacity to reproduce statistics of observed extreme flows. The performance of HERA increases through time and with catchment size, and it varies in space depending on reservoir influence and model calibration. The fine spatial and temporal resolution results in an enhanced performance compared to previous hydrological reanalysis based on OS LISFLOOD for small- to medium-scale catchments (100–10 000 km2). HERA is the first publicly available long-term, high-resolution hydrological reanalysis for Europe. Despite its limitations, HERA enables the analysis of hydrological dynamics related to extremes, human influences, and climate change at a continental scale while maintaining local relevance. It also creates the opportunity to study these dynamics in ungauged catchments across Europe. The HERA hydrological reanalysis and its climate and dynamic socio-economic inputs are available via the JRC data catalogue: https://doi.org/10.2905/a605a675-9444-4017-8b34-d66be5b18c95 (Tilloy et al., 2024).

Previous health impact assessments of temperature-related mortality in Europe indicated that the mortality burden attributable to cold is much larger than for heat. Questions remain as to whether climate change can result in a net decrease in temperature-related mortality. In this study, we estimated how climate change could affect future heat-related and cold-related mortality in 854 European urban areas, under several climate, demographic and adaptation scenarios. We showed that, with no adaptation to heat, the increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across all considered scenarios in Europe. Under the lowest mitigation and adaptation scenario (SSP3-7.0), we estimate a net death burden due to climate change increasing by 49.9% and cumulating 2,345,410 (95% confidence interval = 327,603 to 4,775,853) climate change-related deaths between 2015 and 2099. This net effect would remain positive even under high adaptation scenarios, whereby a risk attenuation of 50% is still insufficient to reverse the trend under SSP3-7.0. Regional differences suggest a slight net decrease of death rates in Northern European countries but high vulnerability of the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe areas. Unless strong mitigation and adaptation measures are implemented, most European cities should experience an increase of their temperature-related mortality burden.

Flood impacts in Europe are considered to be increasing, especially in connection to climate change. However, attribution of impacts to climatic and societal drivers of past floods has been limited to a selection of recent events. Here, we present an impact attribution study covering 1729 riverine, coastal and compound events that were responsible for the large majority of flood-related impacts in Europe between 1950 and 2020. We show that in most regions the magnitude of flood impacts has been regulated primarily by the opposing direct human actions. On the one hand, the population and economic value at risk have increased, exacerbated by land use change. However, it was compensated by improved risk management, manifested by better flood protection and lower vulnerability. Climate change and human alterations of river catchments were also important drivers in many regions, but ultimately less relevant for trends in total, continental-wide impacts. Overall, our study highlights the need for multidimensional impact attribution of past natural hazards. Attribution results for individual events are available on https://naturalhazards.eu/.

Climate change is expected to result in rising seas, exacerbating coastal floods ¹ and erosion ² . Remote islands are projected to be among the most challenged regions, due to their geographic isolation and fragile economies. While, Small Island Developing States have been attracting the attention of scientists and policy makers, Europe’s Outermost Regions (ORs) and Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) remain poorly studied in terms of their impacts from Sea Level Rise (SLR). Here we carry out a data-modelling framework to comprehensively study risks of flooding, the submergence of flat regions, and coastal erosion along coastlines of ORs and OCTs. Our study shows that under a high emissions scenario by 2150 annually nearly 3,000 km ² is expected to be flooded, one third of which by tidal flooding, while 150 km ² of land will be lost by coastal erosion. This translates into an annual exposure to coastal inundation of up to half a million of people and an economic damage of 5.9 € billion per year - a 40-fold increase from today. Our study shows the increasing benefits in time of stringent climate mitigation, which could nearly halve these impacts in the long run. However, sea levels will continue to rise long after net zero carbon is reached, and so will the consequent impacts, highlighting the critical importance of proactive efforts to increase the resilience of these vulnerable regions against rising seas.

Long-term trends in flood losses are regulated by multiple factors including climate variation, demographic dynamics, economic growth, land-use transitions, reservoir construction and flood risk reduction measures. The attribution of those drivers through the use of counterfactual scenarios of hazard, exposure or vulnerability first requires a good representation of historical events, including their location, their intensity and the factual circumstances in which they occurred. Here, we develop a chain of models that is capable of recreating riverine, coastal and compound floods in Europe between 1950 and 2020 that had a potential to cause significant socioeconomic impacts. This factual catalogue of almost 15 000 such events was scrutinized with historical records of flood impacts. We found that at least 10 % of them led to significant socioeconomic impacts (including fatalities) according to available sources. The model chain was able to capture events responsible for 96 % of known impacts contained in the Historical Analysis of Natural Hazards in Europe (HANZE) flood impact database in terms of persons affected and economic losses and for 81 % of fatalities. The dataset enables the study of the drivers of vulnerability and flood adaptation due to a large sample of events with historical impact data. The model chain can be further used to generate counterfactual events, especially those related to climate change and human influence on catchments.

Seaports are critical for global trade and development but are at risk of climate change-driven damages, operational disruptions and delays with extensive related economic losses. The aim of the present contribution is to (a) provide an overview of the main impacts of climate variability and change (CV&C) on ports; (b) present recent research on trends and projections involving the main climatic factors/hazards affecting global ports; (c) provide an analytical overview of emerging international and regional policies and legislation relevant to port risk assessment and resilience-building under climate change; and (d) consider issues and areas for further action. As shown by projections under different climatic scenarios and timelines, many global ports will increasingly be exposed to significantly growing hazards under increasing CV&C, including extreme sea levels (ESLs), waves, and extreme heat events. Depending on scenario (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) by 2050, 55% to 59% of the 3630 global ports considered could face ESLs in excess of 2 m above the baseline mean sea levels (mean of the 1980–2014 period); by 2100, between 71% and 83% of ports could face ESLs of this magnitude. Ports in most tropical/sub-tropical settings will face the baseline (mean of the 1976– 2005 period) 1-in-100 year extreme heat every 1 – 5 years, whereas with 3 oC global warming, most global ports (except some in higher latitudes) could experience the baseline 1-in-100 years extreme heat event every 1 – 2 years. A range of policy and legal instruments to support climate change adaptation, resilience-building and disaster risk reduction have been agreed internationally as well as at regional levels. At the EU level, relevant legal obligations and related normative technical guidance aimed at ensuring the climate proofing of new infrastructure are already in place as a matter of supra-national law for 27 EU Member States. These could significantly enhance levels of climate-resilience and preparedness for ports within the EU, as well as for EU funded port projects in other countries, and may serve as useful examples of good practices for other countries. However, further action is needed to advance and accelerate the implementation of effective adaptation measures for ports across regions.