Building capacity for risk management in a changing climate: A synthesis report from the Raising Risk Awareness project

This report provides a summary of the Raising Risk Awareness project’s results and learning. The Raising Risk Awareness project uses the latest advances in climate science to understand the role of climate change in the occurrence of extreme events such as flooding, droughts and heatwaves in developing countries. Having a better understanding of whether and how climate change might affect the likelihood and severity of extreme events in a particular location is important when managing future climate risk. The project analyses the role of climate change in recent droughts in Ethiopia and Kenya, and recent flooding and heatwave events in India. In Bangladesh, the project examines the risk of coastal flooding as a result of sea level rise induced by climate change, using the Surging Seas tool.

The Raising Risk Awareness project sought to raise awareness of and share extreme event attribution analyses with a range of stakeholders across the science, communication and policy communities in Ethiopia, India and Kenya. In many areas of new science, a major challenge relates to the science–communications–policy gap: the challenge of making scientific outputs understandable and actionable for laypersons and policy-makers. Therefore, an important element of the Raising Risk Awareness project was to understand and help address potential science–communications–policy gaps associated with extreme event attribution and sea level rise risk that may exist in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India and Kenya.