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: final response (author comments only)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3451', Anonymous Referee #1, 24 Aug 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3451', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Oct 2025
This article discusses the importance of better understanding how societies around the world are increasingly impacted by climate extremes. The paper is topically relevant for ESD. It does not present novel tools or data, but instead highlights that there is both a need for more progress on impact modeling and a good potential to do so. The paper does not reach substantial new conclusions, as it is more of a position paper than a research paper.
My feeling is that the paper can serve a valuable purpose by helping to draw attention to the relatively primitive state of impact modelling, and by raising some interesting ideas for progress such as the use of LLMs. However I think it can be improved to do a stronger job of this, and could also connect better to a wider swath of relevant literature. I’d therefore suggest a substantial revision, and am providing some suggestions that will hopefully contribute to this.
As one over-arching comment, I think the article could provide more conceptual detail regarding the challenge of understanding impacts, which are fundamentally coupled human-Earth system phenomena and therefore require both natural and human processes. To my (perhaps simplistic) way of thinking, the essential aspects that need to be resolved on the human side are:
1. spatial details of the technosphere, including the aspects of the built environment that are vulnerable and/or modify the impacts resulting from extreme climates. For example, the roadways and transportation hubs that could be affected by floods, the electrical systems that could fail under heavy loading, or the low-lying houses that could be inundated by sea level rise (e.g. Willard-Stepan, 2025), or the air-conditioning systems that mitigate heat waves.
2. the spatial details of human populations themselves, and their activities. There is work on spatially-detailed exposure to heat stress, for example (e.g. Dunne, Nature Climate Change 2013; Vecellio, PNAS 2023), but this could be expanded to other variables.
Both of these aspects could easily become overwhelmingly complicated, but I think it’s feasible that useful levels of detail could be developed, at which impact risks become reasonably resolved. I am not advocating that the authors necessarily add discussion of these two aspects, but am offerring them as an example in trying to spur more mechanistic conceptual discussion.
More detailed points for consideration:
1. It may be useful to provide a definition of what an ‘impact’ is, as well as some kind of taxonomy of impacts. Personally I found the distinction between hazard and impact useful - perhaps this could be highlighted a bit more up front, even in the abstract? In terms of a potential taxonomy, it seemed the authors are mostly thinking about heat waves, droughts and rain-driven floods, but there could be many other impact types such as long-term sea level rise, fires, or changes in ecosystem function. There are also systemic effects, such as economic disruption, in addition to the local acute impacts. Some kind of structured list might provide a novel resource to help to expand peoples’ thinking on the world of impacts, and help to spur new research lines.
2. I think it would be helpful to emphasize more prominently - especially in the introduction - the fact that impacts sit on the boundary of natural and social science, and therefore have been chronically understudied: they do not easily fit into disciplines. Impact projections require simultaneously projecting the natural climate change and the societal change. There are a number of papers talking about this issue, with respect to the gap between human systems and climate models, such as work by Beckage (e.g. Climatic Change, 2020) and Tapiador (Environmental Research Climate, 2024).
3. The figure forms a central part of the paper, but I found it difficult to understand what was intended by the first two categories. Data is always a challenge in every branch of science, and ‘genesis’ implies a beginning - it’s not clear if this would apply to the beginning of the social structure that led to vulnerability, or what. I would suggest that the authors consider renaming these as ‘Observational challenge’ for the first, and ‘Process understanding challenge’ for the second, as I think these terms may more accurately express what the authors intend to convey?
4. Section 3.3 talks a lot about storylines, which can be good for expanding imagination. Yet storylines, on their own, do not make use of physical principles that can constrain the realm of what is actually feasible or likely. I think it’s important to develop mechanistic models, based on physical foundations, that can help point towards the likely outcomes of actions. If the authors agree, it would be good to emphasize that storylines are not enough.
5. Any impact assessment is always going to be inherently probablistic, rather than deterministic. So presumably the goal is not to predict events, but to map out types of events that are more likely to occur. These will be most useful if society can use them to pre-emptively adjust, altering the technosphere or human behaviour. I think this fact makes it especially important to resolve both the technosphere and human behaviour within the impact assessment framework - not because they can be predicted in any deterministic sense, but because these are the variables that can be adjusted, so understanding how they fit into the evolution of risk is very valuable.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3451-RC2
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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:
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