Climate risk index for Italy

We describe climate risk index for Italy initially developed for the scope of the National Climate Adaptation Plan in Italy and further extended in this article. The index combines (i) climate change amplified hazards approximated by anomalies of selected extreme climate indices; (ii) exposure which includes high-resolution datasets on economic, social, natural and built-or manufactured capitals; and (iii) vulnerability which comprises both present-time sensitivity to climate induced hazards and adaptive capacity. For analysing hazards we use high resolution regional climate models’ simulations from EURO-CORDEX initiative. The extreme climate indices are chosen from those developed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) and the Expert Team on Sector-specific Climate Indices (ET-SCI). The high resolution exposure datasets include among others the Copernicus land use and impervious cover, gridded population and economic (gross added value and gross domestic product), natural protected areas, and datasets derived from the European Soil Database. Our methodology is similar to that used by the ESPON for pan-European climate risk assessment, with improvements in (model ensemble) data used and (more robust) analysis. The results of the climate risk analysis is used to rank the subnational administrative and statistical units according to the climate risk challenges, and possibly for financial resource allocation for climate adaptation