Future work

Future work

(please provide general comments on future work here)

What started as an EEA core set indicator “Economic losses from climate-related extremes in Europe” became a product serving multiple EU policies. For several years, an adapted version of the indicator is part of the 100 indicators used to measures EU progress on the SDGs managed by Eurostat. EIOPA, the European insurance and occupational pension authority, is mandated to develop natural catastrophe dashboard. EEA provides data supporting the further development and update of this dashboard, and EEA and EIOPA are working together on developing the knowledge base on physical risks and the protection gap in Europe.

The data and indicators were a key source in the staff working document “Closing the climate protection gap - Scoping policy and data gaps” prepared by a large group of Directorates general of the European Commission and EU Agencies under the coordination by the Directorate General for Climate Action, as well as for the staff working document “Overview of natural and man-made disaster risks the European Union may face” by the Directorate General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid.

Further future collaboration under development are the potential use of information in the indicators to measure the progress under the Eighth Environmental Action Programme of the EU, the Green Resilience Dashboard Indicators of the Joint Research Centre and the future Fiscal Sustainability Reporting by the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs.

Beyond supporting other EU services, the EEA will make methodological improvements to the work on economic losses, insured economic losses and fatalities, including aspects like

• the normalisation of losses and trend analysis;
• the combination of observed and modelled loss data;
• the distribution of losses from cascading effects;
• expanding the dataset with the west Balkans countries; and
• more detailed statistics for specific regions within Europe or single hazards (e.g. droughts in the Mediterranean).

With the publication of the EU Adaptation Strategy and the Closing the protection gap staff working document, there is a momentum to build public European datasets on total and insured economic losses and human impacts from weather and climate related events. EEA will support the Joint Research Centre, who is mandated to collect and distribute the information from public sources on, based on the knowledge gathered in this topic over the last decade. As for several reporting mechanisms on climate risks and climate change adaptation, collecting data at European level is less detailed than the information available at national or even (sub-national) regional level. The added value is in the comparability of information from different countries.

Here a paragraph will be added with an example of activities at national level, referring to a Box 2 about the activities in Germany.

Box 2 - Collecting data on economic losses and fatalities in Germany