the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 25 Jul 2025
Challenges and Opportunities for Understanding Societal Impacts of Climate Extremes
Abstract. Climate extremes exact a heavy toll on society, with adverse impacts unequally distributed across populations. In this perspective, we outline key challenges and opportunities for advancing research on understanding societal impacts of climate extremes. We identify three key challenges: limited availability and quality of impact data, difficulties in elucidating the genesis of impacts and lack of reliable impact projections. We argue that there is a window of opportunity to address several dimensions of these challenges, and we highlight recent examples and ongoing developments that hold transformative potential for the research field. We conclude with a call to build momentum by fostering interdisciplinary research and collaboration across sectors.
Competing interests: At least one of the (co-)authors is a member of the editorial board of Earth System Dynamics.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.- Preprint
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Status: open (until 11 Oct 2025)
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3451', Anonymous Referee #1, 24 Aug 2025
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The authors provide a nice framework by identifying three core challenges: impact data, impact genesis, and impact projection. The discussion of recent advances like LLMs, storyline projections, and high-resolution datasets is valuable. The manuscript is well-written, interdisciplinary, and robustly supported by literature.
Here are some points to further enhance the paper's contribution:
- Section 3.1 (LLMs for Impact Data): The application of new techniques, e.g., LLMs, is promising. I recommend adding a clear statement on the necessity of careful calibration and validation to ensure the reliability of these methods and prevent significant errors.
- Section 3.2 (Impact Genesis): The opportunities discussed do not fully address the challenge mentioned before, especially, quantifying indirect and cascading impacts. This topic can be expanded by at least including some practices, e.g., Colon et al., 2021, where the indirect economic loss caused by flood via supply-chain is quantified using agent-based modelling, to give a better perspective.
- Section 3.3 (Impact Projection): Including the "reversal of the impact chain" framework (Pfleiderer et al., 2025) would strengthen the discussion on uncertainty control and provide a valuable perspective for generating actionable climate information.
- Event Typology: The discussion would benefit from considering high-impact events driven by spatial concurrence or temporal recurrence, not just statistical extremity. This is a critical dimension of comprehensive risk assessment.
- Sectoral Scope: Expanding the scope of the cases beyond health and hydrology to include key sectors like agriculture, infrastructure, and human security (e.g., displacement) would significantly increase the paper's relevance for a broader audience of stakeholders.
- Equality Dimension: The paper can more explicitly discuss how structural inequalities (e.g., based on gender, income) fundamentally shape exposure and adaptive capacity, moving beyond an acknowledgment of differential vulnerability.
Colon, C., Hallegatte, S. & Rozenberg, J. Criticality analysis of a country’s transport network via an agent-based supply chain model. Nat Sustain 4, 209–215 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00649-4
Pfleiderer, P., Frölicher, T.L., Kropf, C.M. et al. Reversal of the impact chain for actionable climate information. Nat. Geosci. 18, 10–19 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01597-w
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3451-RC1
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