Risk KAN Compound Events webinar – Raphael Neukom

The next Risk KAN Compound Events webinar will be Tues 8 Sep at 14:00 UTC, given by Raphael Neukom. He will provide a long-term view on heat-drought events in the Alps, their evolution, and their effects on ecosystems and societies.

Abstract:

Hot-dry summers like 2026 are increasingly challenging natural and human systems in the Alps. Adaptation is imperative, but information about long-term changes in compound heat and drought events remains scarce, hindering evaluation against pre-industrial variability, the baseline to which many ecosystems and societies have adapted over centuries. Therefore, estimates of the magnitude and speed of adaptation required to avoid unprecedented and potentially damaging conditions are largely lacking.

Using a new multi-century dataset combining instrumental, tree-ring reconstruction, and local-scale climate projection data, we quantify changes in the occurrence of hot-dry summers from 1600 to 2099 CE. Since 1980, both mean climate and the frequency of compound hot-dry extremes have emerged from pre-industrial variability, implying that without climate change adaptation, Alpine systems are now leaving their long-term “safe space”. We show that fast and continuous adaptation within a few decades, depending on emission scenarios, is required to prevent unprecedented hot-dry compound extreme frequencies in the coming decades. We discuss implications of this necessary adaptation speed for human and natural systems in the Alps. Protection forests, for example, are unlikely to match the required fast adaptation rates. Therefore combined forest hazards triggered by hot-dry summers, including tree mortality and bark-beetle outbreaks, might affect the potential of forests to protect critical infrastructure and trade-offs with other forest functions pose a substantial risk of transient maladaptation in Alpine mountain forests.