SWERVE - Severe Weather Events Risk and Vulnerability Estimator

现在有一个广泛的科学共识，即全球气候正在以可能在未来几十年对我们的社会和自然环境产生重大影响的方式发生变化。全球变暖及其对极端天气事件的影响，可能会对我们未来的生活方式产生深远的影响。最近的极端天气事件，如美国2005年飓风季节异常多的飓风，2002年夏季欧洲中部史无前例的洪灾，次年夏天欧洲热浪造成的悲惨生命损失，或2000年秋季英国严重的洪灾，都被媒体认为是全球变暖的可能影响。这使得我们把注意力集中在未来气候变化对我们社会的可能影响上，但最近的研究集中在对未来全球或区域范围内极端天气事件的频率和强度的变化的预测。然而，为了使我们的社会更好地适应气候变化和极端天气事件未来的影响，我们需要知道这些事件将如何影响当地社区，他们可能如何应对，以及需要采取哪些紧急和长期规划措施来提高他们的复原力。SWERVE(严重天气事件风险和脆弱性评估)工具将通过与英国其他专家合作，在一个名为CREW：社区对极端天气的弹性的跨学科研究计划中，研究这些和其他基本研究问题。Swerve将使用来自全球气候模型的信息和一种名为缩减尺度的技术来产生有关当地和社区层面的极端天气的相关信息。这将使我们能够估计不同类型的极端天气，如洪水、风暴、干旱、热浪等，现在和未来可能发生的频率。它还将使我们能够确定风险的“热点”，这些社区可能容易受到一种以上类型的极端天气事件的影响，例如，他们可能在冬季遭受洪水，在夏季遭受干旱。使用其他建模工具，我们将能够识别这些类型的极端天气事件的风险位置，一直到邮政编码级别。然后，这些信息将与关于我们社会的信息一起使用，以确定特别脆弱的社区和地点。总体结果将是决策者在面临应对极端天气事件的规划和管理决策时可以使用的工具包。这将提高社区处理后果和计划减少极端天气影响的能力。船员计划将是一个试点研究，可以在英国各地制作一个工具包。试点研究将重点放在伦敦东南部复原区，并让该地区的利益相关者和英国各地的其他利益相关者参与工具包的开发。这将确保这是您和当地紧急服务机构、城市规划者和当地政府所需要的。我们还将通过将该工具应用于一些“假设”来研究该工具是否有用。案例与当地决策者一起，并在当地公司进行测试。这个新的工具包可以被管理者用来设计对气候变化的影响强大的系统；根据政府间气候变化专门委员会今年2月的最新报告，气候变化很可能是由人类活动引起的，很可能导致极端天气事件的增加。

There is now a broad scientific consensus that the global climate is changing in ways that are likely to have a large impact on our society and the natural environment over the coming decades. Global warming, and its impact on extreme weather events, may have a profound influence on the way we live in the future. Recent extreme weather events, such as the unusual number of hurricanes in the US 2005 hurricane season, the unprecedented flooding in central Europe insummer 2002, the tragic loss of life in the European heatwave the following summer, or the severity of flooding in the UK during autumn 2000, have been said to be a possible impact of global warming by the media. This has made us focus our attention on the possible impacts of future climate change on our society but most recent research has focussed on predictions of change in the future frequency and intensity of extreme weather events at a global or regional scale. However, to well-adapt our society to the future impacts of climate change and extreme weather events, we need to know how these events will affect local communities, how they may respond and what emergency and long term planning measures need to be undertaken to increase their resilience. The SWERVE (Severe Weather Events Risk and Vulnerability Estimator) tool will examine these and other fundamental research questions through collaboration with other experts in the UK in an inter-disciplinary research programme called CREW: Community Resilience to Extreme Weather. SWERVE will use information from global climate models and a technique called downscaling to produce relevant information on extreme weather at the local, community level. This will allow us to estimate how often different types of extreme weather, such as floods, storms, drought, heatwaves, etc., may happen both now and in the future. It will also allow us to identify 'hotspots' of risk, where communities may be vulnerable to more than one type of extreme weather event, e.g. they may suffer from floods in the winter and drought in the summer. Using additional modelling tools we will be able to identify locations at risk from these types of extreme weather events down to the postcode level. This information will then be used together with information on our society to identify communities and locations that are particularly vulnerable. The overall output will be a toolkit that decision-makers can use when faced with planning and management decisions for coping with extreme weather events. This will increase the ability of the community to deal with the aftermath and to plan to reduce the impacts of extreme weather.The CREW programme will be a pilot study for a toolkit that could be produced across the UK. The pilot study will focus on the SE London Resilience Zone and engage stakeholders from this region and others across the UK in the development of the toolkit. This will ensure that it is what you and local emergency services, town planners and local government need. We will also look at whether the tool will be useful by applying it to some 'what-if?' cases together with local decision-makers and by testing it in local firms. This new toolkit can be used by managers to design systems that are robust to the impacts of climate change; climate change that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report in February this year, is very likely to be caused by human activities and is likely to cause an increase in extreme weather events.