Compound weather and climate events in 2024

Compound weather and climate events refer to multiple drivers and hazards that combine to cause impacts on ecosystems and society. These drivers and hazards can combine in various ways — across time (preconditioned and temporally compounding events), across space (spatially compounding events), and/or across multiple climate variables (multivariate events) — giving rise to a myriad of possible events. Owing to their complex nature, compound events can result in particularly severe impacts as multiple adverse conditions can interact and amplify. Systematic monitoring of when, where and how these events occur enhances our understanding of their dynamics and helps mitigate the risks associated with their impacts. Here, we examine compound events that occurred in 2024 around the globe (Fig. 1). Given the vast number of individual occurrences, we focus on a selection of particularly impactful episodes across the different compound event types.