Why Today's Hazard Maps Fail Tomorrow's Decisions

Most physical risk assessments anchor to a fixed map: current hazard levels, current exposure, current infrastructure. That approach treats climate risk as a static snapshot. But climate change does not produce static outcomes - it produces trajectories. A location with moderate flood exposure today may face limited escalation under a lower-emissions pathway and severe intensification under a higher one. When risk frameworks cannot distinguish between those outcomes, they cannot support decisions that depend on knowing which future is most likely.

This research addresses that gap directly. Emmi's Climate Hazard Diagnostics (CHD) framework provides global, location-based projections of how acute physical hazards - wildfire, tropical cyclones, coastal flooding, and fluvial flooding - are expected to evolve across multiple climate scenarios and time horizons. Built on established, peer-reviewed datasets including CMIP6 fire-weather projections, STORM synthetic cyclone simulations, and WRI Aqueduct flood models, the framework delivers standardised hazard metrics at 1 km and 11 km resolutions for a historical baseline and future periods spanning 2030 to 2080.

The methodology focuses on change relative to a historical baseline rather than absolute local conditions. This is a deliberate design choice. Global climate models are best suited to capturing how extreme conditions intensify as the climate warms; they cannot reliably resolve fine-scale local features such as flood defences or land management. By anchoring metrics to change from baseline, CHD isolates the climate-driven signal while remaining robust across large geographies and diverse asset types. Intensity metrics are normalised using scenario-consistent global reference maxima rather than local scaling, ensuring that higher-emissions pathways register proportionally higher hazard levels and that differences across scenarios remain visible and comparable.

Each hazard is represented along two complementary dimensions: a normalised intensity index capturing maximum potential severity, and an annual exceedance probability capturing how often damage-relevant conditions are expected to occur. These dimensions are combined and calibrated into Average Annual Loss (AAL) - expected annual economic damage expressed as a fraction of asset value. This enables direct interpretation of physical hazard change in financial terms and integration into expected loss and Value-at-Risk frameworks.

For anyone making long-horizon decisions about fixed assets - infrastructure, real estate, resource operations - the implications are concrete. Locations that appear equivalent under a static assessment can diverge materially by mid-century under different warming pathways. CHD supports location-scale screening to identify where hazards are projected to intensify most strongly, scenario-based comparison to assess how outcomes differ across warming pathways, and prioritisation of assets warranting deeper, site-specific analysis.

The framework is not designed to replace engineering analysis, local floodplain mapping, or insurance underwriting. It provides a consistent, transparent hazard diagnostics layer: a starting point for understanding where and under which scenarios acute physical risks are likely to escalate.

Download the full white paper to examine the methodology, hazard-by-hazard construction, and framework for integration with financial risk assessment.