Attribution of extreme events to climate change

Abstract

Within the past decade, the attribution of extreme weather events and their impacts has enabled scientists, the public, and policymakers alike to connect real-world experiences of extreme weather events with scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change. Attribution studies of recent extreme weather events have formed a new and important line of evidence in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report understanding present-day impacts of climate change. IPCC studies using different methods of event attribution have been assessed together, highlighting that these differences are smaller than the academic discourse on the methods suggests. This development raised two important research questions the science needs to answer: First, how do we formally combine attribution statements using highly conditional methods with probabilistic assessments of how climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events? Second, under what circumstances are individual attribution studies still necessary and to what extent do existing attribution studies provide enough information to answer societal questions? Furthermore, the scientific development still leaves important gaps, particularly in countries of the Global South, leading to ethical questions around the need and requirement of attribution of extreme events in policy contexts, informing adaptation and loss and damage and the role of vulnerability.