To plan for the future, we need to understand the risks we face. When it comes to climate change, that means calculating the potential impact of events like hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves. This is where CLIMADA comes in. It’s an open-source platform developed at ETH Zurich designed to do exactly that: assess climate risk and help plan for adaptation.

Think of it as a powerful calculator for climate-related disasters. It takes complex data about weather events and the human world and translates it into clear, actionable information about potential economic damages. This helps governments, businesses, and communities make smarter decisions to protect people and property.

CLIMADA calculates risk by combining three key pieces of information: the hazard, the exposure, and the vulnerability. It's a logical flow that builds a complete picture of what could happen.

Let’s break these down:

• Hazard: This is the physical event itself. CLIMADA can model a wide range of hazards, from tropical cyclones and river floods to wildfires and heatwaves. It looks at the potential intensity and frequency of these events.
• Exposure: This represents what is at risk. It's a map of all the valuable assets in a given area, such as homes, office buildings, infrastructure like roads and power lines, and agricultural land.
• Vulnerability: This is the crucial link between the hazard and the exposure. It describes how much damage a particular asset will suffer when hit by a hazard of a certain intensity. For example, a concrete building is less vulnerable to high winds than a wooden one.

CLIMADA's design makes it a flexible and powerful tool for a wide range of users.

One of its biggest strengths is that it's open-source. This means the code is freely available for anyone to use, inspect, and modify. This transparency builds trust and allows a global community of scientists to contribute to its development.

It also has global coverage. You can use CLIMADA to assess risk in a single city or across an entire continent. The platform is designed to work with both global datasets and more detailed local information, allowing users to tailor the analysis to their specific needs.

Finally, CLIMADA isn't just for identifying problems. It’s also built for finding solutions. The platform can be used to model the effectiveness of different adaptation measures. For example, a city could use CLIMADA to calculate how much damage would be avoided by building a new sea wall or upgrading its drainage systems. This helps prioritize investments and develop effective, data-driven climate adaptation strategies.