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Under the umbrella of the European Green Deal, the European Commission presented in February 2021 a new EU Adaptation Strategy “Forging a climate-resilient Europe”, suggesting action for smarter, faster, more systemic adaptation and with renewed attention for the international dimension. As part of the smarter adaptation objective, more and better climate-related risk and losses data are requested as these kind of data are crucial to improve the accuracy of climate risk assessments. As a response to that objective, EEA has updated the information on economic losses using two sources of data. In this briefing, results from CATDAT (RiskLayer GmbH) and NatCatSERVICE (MunichRe GmbH) are presented (see Box 1). The losses are presented in 3 groups of weather and climate extreme events: meteorological events (e.g. storms), hydrological events (e.g. floods) and the climatological events (e.g. heat and cold waves, droughts...). The geographical coverage is 32 EEA member countries.
Box 1 – Additional data sources for EEA work on economic losses and fatalities
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For a decade, the European Environment Agency (EEA) receives an extract, covering all 32 EEA member countries, from the NatCatSERVICE database from MunichRe GmbH under institutional agreement and where contractual terms about disclosure apply. For a long time, this was one of the only databases focussing on all natural hazards and on the total and insured losses. EEA did not get the final figures for its indicator but did the analysis on the (semi-)raw information extracted from NatCatSERVICE. Nowadays, more data are available compared to a decade ago. To be able to make more detailed analyses – and publish the results – EEA since 2021 also procures the CATDAT database from RiskLayer GmbH.
Although similar in scope, the data are not identical. Each of these datasets is constructed based on a series of explicit and implicit choices and assumptions. The “correct” dataset does not exist! There is only the expectation that each of the datasets are internally as coherent as possible. Therefore, the EEA presents in this briefing the data from both sources next to each other, without gap filling or combining the data.
EEA always valued and continues to value the collaboration with MunichRe highly and understands the limitations that come with the data agreement. At the same time, there is a permanent and ever stronger request for more detailed analyses, presenting information for individual hazards, per decade, per regions etc. While restrictions remain on the disclosure of data, the CATDAT database creates the possibility to make these additional assessments available in the future. |