Climate change drives disaster risk
How does climate change drive disaster risk?
It can increase the hazard while at the same time decreasing the resilience of households and communities.
Climate change refers to a change in the climate that persists for decades or longer, arising from either natural causes or human activity.
It is already modifying the frequency and intensity of many weather-related hazards, and steadily increasing the vulnerability of exposed populations that depend on arable land, access to water, and stable mean temperatures and rainfall.
It could also change the geographic distribution of weather-related hazards, which may lead to new patterns of risk.
It alters hazards
Changing the frequency and intensity of hazard events.
It affects vulnerability
Eroding the resilience of households and communities.
It shifts exposure
Changing where hazards occur and who lives in their path.
Although the precise impact is not certain, not all areas will be impacted in the same way. That is why risk has to be understood place by place.
What do the latest forecasts show?
Global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years.
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the surge is fuelled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño event.
Annual average near-surface temperature more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one year, 2023–2027.
At least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.
Predicted precipitation for May to September, 2023–2027, compared with 1991–2020, suggests more rainfall in the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and northern Siberia, and less rainfall over the Amazon and parts of Australia.
For farmers and planners, the result is the same: past seasons are no longer a reliable guide to the next one.
Which hazards will climate change intensify?
Five projected impacts will drive disaster risk, even though not every area will feel them the same way.
Droughts
The number of people suffering extreme droughts could double in less than 80 years, with major implications for the rural poor and for migration. Natural land water storage will likely fall sharply in two-thirds of the world, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.
Sea level rise
Coastal flooding could threaten assets worth up to 20% of global GDP by 2100. Coastal populations have grown faster than global population, and flooding hotspots are projected in north-western Europe and Asia.
Infectious diseases
By 2050, mosquitoes carrying vector-borne diseases like malaria could reach an estimated 500 million people. Bats and rodents, responsible for 60% of diseases passed from animals to humans, have flourished with altered climate, urbanization and deforestation.
Wildfires
By 2030, fire season could be three months longer in areas already exposed. In Western Australia, that would add up to three months of days with high wildfire potential. While fire is a natural part of some forest ecosystems, climate change is making forest fires worse, and vice-versa - creating a vicious "climate-fire feedback loop".
Cyclones
Attribution is difficult, but a robust increase of the most devastating storms is evident. Under 2.5°C of warming, they are projected to occur up to twice as often as today.
What the IPCC synthesis report adds
The IPCC report released on 20 March 2023 summarizes eight years of assessments. Two findings stand out:
More intense storms and flooding
The water cycle will continue to intensify as the planet warms: extreme monsoon rainfall, but also more drought, glacier melt, less snow cover and earlier snowmelt.
The longer the delay, the higher the cost
Adaptation for urban areas alone may cost US$64–80 billion a year; doing nothing could cost 10 times that by mid-century (Columbia University estimate).
The message is not only that hazards are changing: waiting makes every one of them more expensive to manage.
Videos on climate change and hazards
Who carries the most risk?
Risk is concentrated in developing countries, and within them in the poorest parts of the population.
Poverty and constrained access to productive assets mean that rural livelihoods that depend on agriculture and natural resources are vulnerable to even slight variations in weather and seasonality (IPCC, 2012).
Rural and urban impacts are intimately linked. As rural livelihoods decline and disaster risk increases, more people may move from rural to urban areas.
Farmers can no longer exchange labour through Nnoboa, a communal system built on helping one another.
An intensifying water cycle means that both wet and dry extremes and the general variability of the water cycle will increase, although not uniformly around the globe.”
Matthew Barlow
Professor of Climate Science, UMass Lowell
Climate risk does not stay where the hazard strikes: it travels through trade, migration and shared resources.
How might the future unfold?
Five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways describe plausible futures, each with different challenges for mitigation and adaptation.
The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are part of a scenario framework established by the climate change research community to support integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation and mitigation.
SSP1: Sustainability: taking the green road (Low challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
The world shifts gradually but pervasively toward a more sustainable path, emphasizing inclusive development that respects environmental boundaries. Investment in education and health accelerates, the emphasis shifts from economic growth to human well-being, inequality is reduced, and consumption is oriented toward low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity.
SSP2: Middle of the road (Medium challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
Social, economic and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns. Development proceeds unevenly, institutions make slow progress on sustainable development goals, environmental systems degrade, population growth levels off in the second half of the century, and income inequality persists or improves only slowly.
SSP3: Regional rivalry: a rocky road (High challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
Resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to focus on domestic or regional issues. Investment in education and technology declines, economic development is slow and material-intensive, inequalities worsen, and low priority for environmental concerns leads to strong environmental degradation in some regions.
SSP4: Inequality: a road divided (Low challenges to mitigation, high challenges to adaptation)
Highly unequal investment in human capital and widening disparities in opportunity and political power lead to stratification across and within countries. A gap widens between a connected, knowledge-intensive society and fragmented lower-income societies; social cohesion degrades, and environmental policies focus on local issues in middle- and high-income areas.
SSP5: Fossil-fueled development: taking the highway (High challenges to mitigation, low challenges to adaptation)
The world places faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies, with strong investment in health, education and institutions. This is coupled with exploitation of abundant fossil fuels and resource-intensive lifestyles, leading to rapid economic growth, while global population peaks and declines in the 21st century.
The pathways show that socio-economic choices shape risk as much as the climate itself.
What is attribution science?
It estimates how human-induced climate change affects the magnitude and probability of an extreme event.
Attribution science is a new but rapidly growing field of climate science that investigates the links between climate change and extreme weather events.
What can’t attribution science do?
It cannot determine if climate change caused an event.
What can attribution science do?
It can determine if climate change made an event more severe and more likely, and by how much.
Knowing the difference stops attribution being misread as blame for a single event. Explore resources on attribution science
How to communicate on climate change?
Make complex science understandable, relevant and actionable.
Global temperature trends and future climate scenarios can feel abstract or distant, particularly when presented through technical data alone. Clear language, simple explanations and accessible visualisations can help audiences understand what is changing and why it matters. Research suggests that visual representations showing tangible changes – such as a lake that no longer freezes or the disappearance of snow in familiar places – can make climate impacts more immediate and easier to grasp.
Good climate communication turns data into decisions people can act on.
How to build climate resilience?
It is not inevitable that climate change leads to increasing disaster risk.
It is important to differentiate between climate change and the disaster risks associated with it. Because climate change is closely linked to other risk drivers, it must be addressed together with them. If not, disaster risk will keep increasing even if climate change is successfully mitigated.
Patterns of risk are also related to the growth of informal settlements in exposed areas, lack of investment in drainage infrastructure, and deficiencies in urban and local governance. By addressing these, we can build resilience to climate change.
Addressing the underlying risk drivers is key to both disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation (UNDRR, 2009b).
Climate change has emerged as a sector in itself, with its own institutions, global framework and funding. Since the Nairobi Work Programme was formulated at the Conference of the Parties in 2006, many strategies have created the impression of convergence with disaster risk reduction and sustainable development.
Several countries, such as the Philippines, Viet Nam and others in the Pacific, have merged regulations, guidelines, policy frameworks and budgets for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. They remain the minority: most national policies keep distinct concepts, plans, reporting lines and budgets.
Videos on how to reduce climate risks
The opportunity is in joining the two agendas up, so that one plan, one budget and one reporting line reduce risk from every driver.
Last updated: November 2026