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    Assessing inter-sectoral climate change risks: The role of ISIMIP
    (Bristol : IOP Publishing, 2017) Rosenzweig, Cynthia; Arnell, Nigel W.; Ebi, Kristie L.; Lotze-Campen, Hermann; Raes, Frank; Rapley, Chris; Smith, Mark Stafford; Cramer, Wolfgang; Frieler, Katja; Reyer, Christopher P.O.; Schewe, Jacob; van Vuuren, Detlef; Warszawski, Lila
    The aims of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) are to provide a framework for the intercomparison of global and regional-scale risk models within and across multiple sectors and to enable coordinated multi-sectoral assessments of different risks and their aggregated effects. The overarching goal is to use the knowledge gained to support adaptation and mitigation decisions that require regional or global perspectives within the context of facilitating transformations to enable sustainable development, despite inevitable climate shifts and disruptions. ISIMIP uses community-agreed sets of scenarios with standardized climate variables and socio-economic projections as inputs for projecting future risks and associated uncertainties, within and across sectors. The results are consistent multi-model assessments of sectoral risks and opportunities that enable studies that integrate across sectors, providing support for implementation of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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    High-income does not protect against hurricane losses
    (Bristol : IOP Publishing, 2016) Geiger, Tobias; Frieler, Katja; Levermann, Anders
    Damage due to tropical cyclones accounts for more than 50% of all meteorologically-induced economic losses worldwide. Their nominal impact is projected to increase substantially as the exposed population grows, per capita income increases, and anthropogenic climate change manifests. So far, historical losses due to tropical cyclones have been found to increase less than linearly with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP). Here we show that for the United States this scaling is caused by a sub-linear increase with affected population while relative losses scale super-linearly with per capita income. The finding is robust across a multitude of empirically derived damage models that link the storm's wind speed, exposed population, and per capita GDP to reported losses. The separation of both socio-economic predictors strongly affects the projection of potential future hurricane losses. Separating the effects of growth in population and per-capita income, per hurricane losses with respect to national GDP are projected to triple by the end of the century under unmitigated climate change, while they are estimated to decrease slightly without the separation.
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    Reply to Comment on 'High-income does not protect against hurricane losses'
    (Bristol : IOP Publishing, 2017) Geiger, Tobias; Frieler, Katja; Levermann, Anders
    Recently a multitude of empirically derived damage models have been applied to project future tropical cyclone (TC) losses for the United States. In their study (Geiger et al 2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 084012) compared two approaches that differ in the scaling of losses with socio-economic drivers: the commonly-used approach resulting in a sub-linear scaling of historical TC losses with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP), and the disentangled approach that shows a sub-linear increase with affected population and a super-linear scaling of relative losses with per capita income. Statistics cannot determine which approach is preferable but since process understanding demands that there is a dependence of the loss on both GDP per capita and population, an approach that accounts for both separately is preferable to one which assumes a specific relation between the two dependencies. In the accompanying comment, Rybski et al argued that there is no rigorous evidence to reach the conclusion that high-income does not protect against hurricane losses. Here we affirm that our conclusion is drawn correctly and reply to further remarks raised in the comment, highlighting the adequateness of our approach but also the potential for future extension of our research.