Development of a Physical Climate Risk Assessment Toolbox

The ongoing changing climate requires immediate action to mitigate (and adapt) to climate change on all scales from single households to countrywide political decisions. Within the last years, regulatory frameworks (e.g., regulations from the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or the EU taxonomy) evolved rapidly and will affect small and medium-sized enterprises in the future. These frameworks require climate data until the end of the century to assess physical climate related hazards at company locations. In this study, a new climate risk assessment tool developed by the Swiss company meteoblue AG is presented. This tool distinguishes between three different data types and can provide data until the end of the century for all relevant emission scenarios based on a combination of CMIP6 data and ERA5 spatio/temporal downscaling techniques. Data are available for any location on Earth via an automated interface: 1. Hourly raw data for temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and solar radiation. 2. Processed data (e.g. average number of hot days) for different time periods in the future (e.g. 2070 – 2099) 3. Hazard data for all variables according to EU taxonomy in five different categories This study focuses on the one hand on the uncertainties in the data, due to a) limitations of the horizontal resolution b) limitations of the accuracy of climate models by analyzing the ensemble spread of a model ensemble and c) limitations due to the interannual variability of the climate. On the other hand, this study highlights customer needs and requirements from regulatory frameworks. We show exemplarily that limitations from climate data and requirements from regulatory frameworks often do not meet each other.