COMPASS Policy Attribution Brief I

This policy brief highlights the critical need to address the complex and compounding impacts of climate extremes, driven by climate change and non-climate factors, to ensure effective disaster risk management and climate adaptation interventions. The brief provides insights from the COMPASS EU-funded project (2024–2026), which aims to develop advanced methods for attribution of compound climate events and their impacts, offering actionable recommendations for policymakers to mitigate future risks. Key findings include: Compounding and cascading impacts: Climate extremes often interact with other hazards and socio-economic drivers, amplifying their effects. Policies must account for these dynamics to avoid ineffective or harmful interventions. Data limitations: High-quality local data on exposure, vulnerability, and impacts are essential for robust impact attribution and policy design. Enhanced data collection and open sharing, particularly in developing regions, should be prioritized. Counterfactual and scenario-based approaches: Methods such as counterfactuals and future scenario analysis can "stress test" policy responses, helping to prioritize and optimize interventions to reduce human and economic losses. Global-to-local insights: Leveraging both global and local datasets ensures scalable solutions while addressing regional and context-specific vulnerabilities. By integrating these findings, policymakers can better design and implement interventions that address both climate and non-climate drivers of risk, enhancing resilience and reducing the impacts of future compound climate events. The current brief aims at facilitating the science-to-policy interfacing, and the transfer of the COMPASS experience into the policy and decision-making fields, informing policy and planning around adaptation, loss and damage, or disaster recovery.