EGU 2026

Probabilistic Assessment of Future Climate Risks and Adaptation Across European Scenarios 
On-site presentation
Time: 08:35–08:45 CEST, Mon 04 May 
Session: Beyond Physical Risk: Assessing Socio-Economic Vulnerability and Actions for Climate Resilience
Location: Room 0.14
Authors: Lorenzo Pierini, Ann-Kathrin Petersen, Rosanne Martyr, Marina Andrijevic, Chahan Kropf, Qinhan Zhu, Yann Quilcaille, Lukas Gudmundsson, Sonia I. Seneviratne, David N. Bresch, and Carl-Friedrich Schleussner

Developing climate-resilient pathways requires an integrated view of risk that combines physical hazards with socio-economic vulnerability and adaptive capacity under future uncertainty. Within the SPARCCLE project, this is achieved by developing a probabilistic climate risk assessment framework for Europe that highlights the highest and recurrent impact patterns of climate extremes, as well as the challenges these pose for adaptation planning.

Projecting the adaptation solution space to inform a climate-resilient Europe 
Poster
Time: 14:00–15:45 CEST, Mon 04 May 
Session: Beyond Physical Risk: Assessing Socio-Economic Vulnerability and Actions for Climate Resilience
Location: Room 0.14
Authors: Ann-Kathrin Petersen, Zachary Zeller, Marina Andrijevic, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, and Rosanne Martyr

Climate adaptation is essential to reduce the risks of climate change and to ensure long-term resilience. This research bridges top‑down climate modelling with bottom‑up adaptation planning to assess how socioeconomic conditions can shape the future adaptation solution space. This approach helps to assess socioeconomic limits to adaptation and the future adaptation solution space, and further enables a more nuanced representation of adaptation in climate impact studies.

Integrating Loss and Damage into Climate Risk Assessment Frameworks: Evidence, Methodological Gaps, and a Pathway for Pacific Small Island Developing States
On-site presentation
Time: 15:05–15:15 CEST, Mon 04 May 
Session: Climate risk storylines: From physical modelling to co-production of storylines for decision-making
Location: Room 2.24
Authors: Mariam Saleh Khan, Sumayya Ijaz, Khadija Irfan, Maria Rehman, Musa Saeed, Patrick Pringle, Olivia Serdeczny, and Fahad Saeed

Climate risk assessments (CRAs) are increasingly used to inform adaptation planning, climate finance, and development decisions. However, existing CRA frameworks vary widely in how they define risk, operationalise assessment methods, and account for adaptation limits and loss and damage. This working paper reviews major global, regional, national, and multilateral CRA frameworks through the lens of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), with a particular focus on their suitability for identifying residual risks, adaptation limits, and economic and non-economic loss and damage.

Storyline-Based Modelling of Cascading Critical Infrastructure Impacts and Recovery in Small Island Developing States 
Poster 
Time: 16:15–18:00 CEST, (display time 14:00–18:00) 
Session: ITS4.37/CL0.13 “Climate Risk Storylines and Scenarios: From physical modelling to co-production for decision-making"
Location: Hall X5, X5.149 
Authors: Juan Camilo Gomez-Zapata, Asher Siebert, Rosanne Martyr, Melania Guerra, Michiel Schaeffer

This poster presents a storyline-based climate risk workflow to evaluate cascading impacts and time-dependent recovery of interdependent infrastructure (electricity, transport, water, telecoms) under compound tropical-cyclone wind and storm-surge scenarios in Small Island Developing States. The framework moves beyond GDP-based loss metrics by capturing service disruptions and cross-sector dependencies, supporting stress-testing of adaptation pathways and informing Loss and Damage and resilience strategies.

From Narratives to Quantification: Co-Developing Stress-Test Scenarios for Climate Adaptation and Mitigation
Poster
Time: 16:15–18:00 CEST, Mon 04 May 
Session: Climate risk storylines: From physical modelling to co-production of storylines for decision-making
Location: Hall X5
Authors: Inga Menke, Sylvia Schmidt, Edward Byers, and Qinhan Zhu

Stress-testing has long been a fundamental practice in fields like finance to evaluate systemic resilience under extreme conditions. Climate scenarios however typically feature average projections and expected impacts, often neglecting critical questions such as “What if we face extremes at the upper ends of climate uncertainty, or at what levels are critical thresholds breached?”. The SPARCCLE project seeks to fill this gap by integrating stress-testing approaches into climate scenario analysis, thereby exploring the implications of extreme, but plausible climate futures under a 1.5°C and a current policy scenario.

Enhancing accessibility and understandability of forest mitigation pathways and data through an integrated science-policy interface 
On-site presentation
Time: 17:50–18:00, Mon, 4 May
Session: Enhancing science-based knowledge on forests’ capacities to mitigate climate change
Location: Room 2.23 (online hybrid)
Authors: Kanwal Nayan Singh, Sylvia Schmidt, Sajid Ali, Rupesh Singh, Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik, Quentin Lejeune, and Fulvio Di Fulvio

Forests are central to climate change mitigation while simultaneously delivering co-benefits to biodiversity, bioeconomy, and climate adaptation. Yet scientific evidence on forest’s mitigation capacities is often fragmented across datasets, spatial scales, and scenario assumptions, consequently limiting accessibility, understandability, and transparency for decision-making. Kanwal Nayan Singh will present the ForestNavigator Portal, a science–policy interface designed to support the integrated exploration of forest carbon mitigation pathways and associated mitigation potentials in the European Union.

From co-developed EU compound shocks to policy options: reviewing impacts for stress testing and resilience
Poster
Time: 14:00–18:00 CEST, Wed, 06 May
Session: Strengthening Policy Through Science: Insights from the interface
Location: Hall X5
Authors: Sylvia Schmidt, Inga Menke

This poster showcases how stakeholder-defined concerns can complement quantitative modelling when it comes to identifying EU policy options for strengthening resilience to compound shocks from climate change. We co-developed extreme yet plausible compound climatic–socioeconomic shock scenarios that could occur between 2020–2050 with EU sectoral experts and policymakers across the energy, finance, and health domains. The poster highlights practical lessons from the engagement process – including how policymaker perceptions were prompted, how scientific outputs can be tailored for policy usability, and where methodological gaps emerge.

Monsoon hysteresis reveals atmospheric memory: implications for Arctic winter sea ice
On-site presentation
Time: 14:40–14:50 CEST, Wed 06 May 
Session: Monsoon systems: processes, prediction, and climatic changes in the past and future 
Location: Room M2
Authors: Anders Levermann, Anja Katzenberger

Within Earth’s climate system, the ocean, cryosphere, and vegetation exhibit hysteresis behaviour such that their state depends on their past and not merely on their current boundary conditions. The atmosphere’s fast mixing time scales were thought to inhibit the necessary memory effect for such multistability. Here, we show that moisture accumulation within the atmospheric column generates hysteresis in monsoon circulation independent of oceanic heat storage and yields two stable atmospheric states for the same solar insolation. The dynamics of monsoon rainfall is thus that of a seasonal transition between two stable states.

Historical Evidence of Compound Heatwave and Extreme Precipitation in Pakistan, 1980-2024 
On-site presentation
Time: 15:35–15:45 CEST
Session: Compound weather and climate events
Location: Room 2.17
Authors: Sumayya Ijaz, Atta Ullah, Rashid Ahmad, Mariam Saleh Khan, Fahad Saeed,

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest coastal city with a population of 25 million, falls within the hottest zone in the world when the combination of heat and humidity (lethal heat) is considered. Fahad Saeed will present on research which compared the weather conditions of the 2015 and 2024 heatwaves at hourly temporal resolution based on a seminal physiological approach for assessing human liveability to conduct sustained levels of work. Our results indicate that the lethal heat conditions, for multiple hours of each heatspell day, went beyond the levels where sustained basic activities for older adults (above 65 years) at a very light intensity, such as slow-based walking and house chores, were not possible.

Real Zero: Assessing the feasibility of a fossil free energy system by mid-century  
On-site presentation
Time: 17:15–17:25 (CEST), Wed 06 May 
Session: Advancing Multidimensional Energy Transitions: Modelling Renewables, Just Transition for Coal Regions, and Real Zero Policy Pathways
Location: Room 051
Authors: Neil Grant, Zarrar Khan, Dimitris Tsekeris, Corbin Cerny, Michael Petroni, Hanna Getachew, and Abhinav Bhaskar

This study introduces the concept of "real zero"—the complete elimination of fossil fuels through replacement with zero-carbon alternatives—and assesses its technical feasibility across five critical sectors: road freight, steel production, international shipping, power generation, and light-duty vehicles. We analyse two complementary lines of evidence: (1) deep decarbonisation pathways from global integrated assessment models, and (2) sector-specific bottom-up modelling and industry roadmaps.

Climate Stress, Infrastructure Limits, and Urban Landslide Risk 
On-site presentation
Time: 14:45–14:55 CEST, Thu, 07 May 
Session: NH9.4 “Urban Risk in a Changing World: Dynamics, Disruption & Resilience in Cities”
Location: Room D2 
Authors: Ugur Ozturk, Philip Bubeck, Anika Braun, Juan Camilo Gómez‑Zapata, Edier Aristizábal

This talk uses the June 2025 Granizal Landslide in the Aburrá Valley, Colombia (27 fatalities) to argue that urban landslide risk is shaped not only by exposure but also by how the exposed elements themselves — roads, sewage systems and other built infrastructure — modify hillslope behaviour. It further discusses how intensifying rainfall under climate change may render the statistical thresholds underlying current infrastructure design inadequate, eroding the knowledge base used to manage landslide risk in tropical urban centres.

From Lethal Heat to Invisible Deaths: Physiological Impact Attribution of Extreme Humid Heat in Karachi, Pakistan
On-site presentation
Time: 16:30–16:40 CEST, Thu 07 May 
Session: Lethal Heat: Extreme Heat–Humidity Events and Human Health Risks
Location: Room 2.17
Authors: Fahad Saeed, Atta Ullah, Anwar Sadad, Mariam Saleh Khan, and Melania Guerra

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest coastal city with a population of 25 million, falls within the hottest zone in the world when the combination of heat and humidity (lethal heat) is considered. Fahad Saeed will present on research which compared the weather conditions of the 2015 and 2024 heatwaves at hourly temporal resolution based on a seminal physiological approach for assessing human liveability to conduct sustained levels of work. Our results indicate that the lethal heat conditions, for multiple hours of each heatspell day, went beyond the levels where sustained basic activities for older adults (above 65 years) at a very light intensity, such as slow-based walking and house chores, were not possible.

Heterogenous effects of Heat-Humidity Events on cognitive performance
On-site presentation
Time: 17:20–17:30 CEST, Thu 07 May 
Session: Lethal Heat: Extreme Heat–Humidity Events and Human Health Risks
Location: Room 2.17
Authors: Lennart Quante and Annika Stechemesser
 
Rising global temperatures increasingly expose populations to extreme heat, yet real-world evidence of how heat-humidity conditions affect cognitive function remains limited. Here, we build a unique data set using chess tournament outcomes as a proxy for cognitive performance. Our results provide rare empirical evidence of heat's cognitive toll in naturalistic settings and establish a scalable framework for estimating productivity losses in service sectors, where cognitive work predominates but physiological heat thresholds applicable to manual labour are less relevant.

When Faith Meets Heat: Climate Change Risks During the Hajj Pilgrimage 
On-site presentation
Time: 17:30–17:40 CEST, Thu 07 May 
Session: Lethal Heat: Extreme Heat–Humidity Events and Human Health Risks
Location: Room 2.17
Authors: Atta Ullah, Anwar Sadad, Mariam Saleh Khan, and Fahad Saeed

Muslim Pilgrimage (Hajj) to Makkah is one of the five pillars of Islam and is mandatory for every Muslim who is physically and financially able to perform it at least once in their lifetime. During the 2024 Hajj, approximately 1,300 fatalities were reported amid extreme humid heat conditions. In this study, we analyzed the 2024 pilgrimage in terms of human physiological limits using temperature and humidity sub daily station-based data. Our results show that survivability limits were exceeded during several hours on each day of the pilgrimage even for the younger adult group (18-40). Although the Pilgrimage will occur during relatively cooler seasons over the next 20–30 years, it is expected to shift back to hotter periods by around 2050.