Alessio Ciullo

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Ciullo

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Alessio

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0000-0001-9032-3169

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Publications 1 - 10 of 12

Increasing countries’ financial resilience through global catastrophe risk pooling
Ciullo, Alessio; Strobl, Eric; Meiler, Simona; et al. (2023)
Nature Communications
Extreme weather events can severely impact national economies, leading the recovery of low- to middle-income countries to become reliant on foreign financial aid. Foreign aid is, however, slow and uncertain. Therefore, the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement advocate for more resilient financial instruments like sovereign catastrophe risk pools. Existing pools, however, might not fully exploit their financial resilience potential because they were not designed to maximize risk diversification and because they pool risk only regionally. Here we introduce a method that forms pools by maximizing risk diversification and apply it to assess the benefits of global pooling compared to regional pooling. We find that global pooling always provides a higher risk diversification, it better distributes countries’ risk shares in the pool’s risk and it increases the number of countries profiting from risk pooling. Optimal global pooling could provide a diversification increase to existing pools of up to 65 %.
Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for probabilistic weather and climate-risk modelling: an implementation in CLIMADA v.3.1.0
Kropf, Chahan Michael; Ciullo, Alessio; Otth, Laura; et al. (2022)
Geoscientific Model Development
Modelling the risk of natural hazards for society, ecosystems, and the economy is subject to strong uncertainties, even more so in the context of a changing climate, evolving societies, growing economies, and declining ecosystems. Here, we present a new feature of the climate-risk modelling platform CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation), which allows us to carry out global uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. CLIMADA underpins the Economics of Climate Adaptation (ECA) methodology which provides decision-makers with a fact base to understand the impact of weather and climate on their economies, communities, and ecosystems, including the appraisal of bespoke adaptation options today and in future. We apply the new feature to an ECA analysis of risk from tropical cyclone storm surge to people in Vietnam to showcase the comprehensive treatment of uncertainty and sensitivity of the model outputs, such as the spatial distribution of risk exceedance probabilities or the benefits of different adaptation options. We argue that broader application of uncertainty and sensitivity analysis will enhance transparency and intercomparison of studies among climate-risk modellers and help focus future research. For decision-makers and other users of climate-risk modelling, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis has the potential to lead to better-informed decisions on climate adaptation. Beyond provision of uncertainty quantification, the presented approach does contextualize risk assessment and options appraisal, and might be used to inform the development of storylines and climate adaptation narratives.
Uncertainties and sensitivities in the quantification of future tropical cyclone risk
Meiler, Simona; Ciullo, Alessio; Kropf, Chahan Michael; et al. (2023)
Communications Earth & Environment
Tropical cyclone risks are expected to increase with climate change and socio-economic development and are subject to substantial uncertainties. We thus assess future global tropical cyclone risk drivers and perform a systematic uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. We combine synthetic tropical cyclones downscaled from CMIP6 global climate models for several emission scenarios with economic growth factors derived from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and a wide range of vulnerability functions. We highlight non-trivial effects between climate change and socio-economic development that drive future tropical cyclone risk. Furthermore, we show that the choice of climate model affects the output uncertainty most among all varied model input factors. Finally, we discover a positive correlation between climate sensitivity and tropical cyclone risk increase. We assert that quantitative estimates of uncertainty and sensitivity to model parameters greatly enhance the value of climate risk assessments, enabling more robust decision-making and offering a richer context for model improvement.
Perspectives on tipping points in integrated models of the natural and human Earth system: cascading effects and telecoupling
Franzke, Christian L.E.; Ciullo, Alessio; Gilmore, Elisabeth A.; et al. (2022)
Environmental Research Letters
The Earth system and the human system are intrinsically linked. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to the climate crisis, which is causing unprecedented extreme events and could trigger Earth system tipping elements. Physical and social forces can lead to tipping points and cascading effects via feedbacks and telecoupling, but the current generation of climate-economy models do not generally take account of these interactions and feedbacks. Here, we show the importance of the interplay between human societies and Earth systems in creating tipping points and cascading effects and the way they in turn affect sustainability and security. The lack of modeling of these links can lead to an underestimation of climate and societal risks as well as how societal tipping points can be harnessed to moderate physical impacts. This calls for the systematic development of models for a better integration and understanding of Earth and human systems at different spatial and temporal scales, specifically those that enable decision-making to reduce the likelihood of crossing local or global tipping points.
Representing storylines with causal networks to support decision making: Framework and example
Kunimitsu, Taro; Baldissera Pacchetti, Marina; Ciullo, Alessio; et al. (2023)
Climate Risk Management
Physical climate storylines, which are physically self-consistent unfoldings of events or pathways, have been powerful tools in understanding regional climate impacts. We show how embedding physical climate storylines into a causal network framework allows user value judgments to be incorporated into the storyline in the form of probabilistic Bayesian priors, and can support decision making through inspection of the causal network outputs. We exemplify this through a specific storyline, namely a storyline on the impacts of tropical cyclones on the European Union Solidarity Fund. We outline how the constructed causal network can incorporate value judgments, particularly the prospects on climate change and its impact on cyclone intensity increase, and on economic growth. We also explore how the causal network responds to policy options chosen by the user. The resulting output from the network leads to individualized policy recommendations, allowing the causal network to be used as a possible interface for policy exploration in stakeholder engagements.
Climate impact storylines for assessing socio-economic responses to remote events
van den Hurk, Bart J.J.M.; Baldissera Pacchetti, Marina; Boere, Esther; et al. (2023)
Climate Risk Management
Quote: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” (Xunzi, ∼300 BCE). Modelling complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions is associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as an approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfoldings of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, development guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses. This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative. Apart from an illustrative gallery of storyline examples found in literature, three examples of varying scope and complexity are presented in detail, all involving the potential impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluate the suitability of the criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to a rigorous design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches.
Intercomparison of regional loss estimates from global synthetic tropical cyclone models
Meiler, Simona; Vogt, Thomas; Bloemendaal, Nadia; et al. (2022)
Nature Communications
Tropical cyclones (TCs) cause devastating damage to life and property. Historical TC data is scarce, complicating adequate TC risk assessments. Synthetic TC models are specifically designed to overcome this scarcity. While these models have been evaluated on their ability to simulate TC activity, no study to date has focused on model performance and applicability in TC risk assessments. This study performs the intercomparison of four different global-scale synthetic TC datasets in the impact space, comparing impact return period curves, probability of rare events, and hazard intensity distribution over land. We find that the model choice influences the costliest events, particularly in basins with limited TC activity. Modelled direct economic damages in the North Indian Ocean, for instance, range from 40 to 246 billion USD for the 100-yr event over the four hazard sets. We furthermore provide guidelines for the suitability of the different synthetic models for various research purposes.
Climate-driven systemic risk to the sustainable development goals
Ciullo, Alessio; Franzke, Christian L.E.; Scheffran, Jürgen; et al. (2025)
PLOS Climate
Anthropogenic global warming affects all aspects of ecosystems and human life. Thus far, most climate impact studies have mainly focused on local impacts because climate-driven hazards – e.g., floods, storms, heat waves – occur locally. However, as the occurrence of past events has already shown, local climate impacts cascade across sectors, regions and scales, possibly leading to systemic risks. Here we highlight the main transmission channels of climate-driven systemic risks, and outline how they can challenge the achievement of the sustainable development goals. We argue for more research into integrated modeling frameworks, understanding and modeling of transmission pathways and systemic climate risk governance approaches.
Challenges of instruments that should tackle multi-hazard and multi-risk situations: an assessment of the recent reforms of the European Solidarity Fund and the Solidarity and Emergency Aid Reserve
Hochrainer-Stigler, Stefan; Zhu, Qinhan; Reiter, Karina; et al. (2023)
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
The European Union has some dedicated tools and mechanisms available to respond to natural hazard events including the European Union Solidarity Fund (EUSF). It follows the objective of granting financial assistance to Member States in the event of a major disaster with serious consequences. In the latest EU long-term budget plan—the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021–2027—the EUSF was merged with the Emergency Aid Reserve (EAR) to form the new Solidarity and Emergency Aid Reserve (SEAR). One additional significant change was made in 2020 which saw an extension of the scope of the EUSF. This extension allowed the EUSF to cover losses incurred due to major public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is therefore now a multi-hazard and multi-risk financing instrument designed to financially assist during the emergency phase in case of an emergency event. We assess the consequences of these changes in the light of potential advantages as well as disadvantages compared to the prior EUSF structure. The results will be used to provide some policy recommendations as to how to move forward with the identified challenges. We especially recommend separating the EUSF from the coverage of large-scale public health emergencies and the emergencies covered by the EAR. Instead, we suggest establishing a new flexibility instrument that covers emergencies such as public health related ones as well as the ones within the EAR. The analysis gives some important insights, scientific as well as policy wise, about advantages as well as limitations of financial instruments that simultaneously should tackle different types of hazards and risks.
Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for probabilistic, global modelling of future tropical cyclone risk
Meiler, Simona; Ciullo, Alessio; Bresch, David N.; et al. (2023)
14th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering(ICASP14)
Modelling the risk of natural hazards for society, ecosystems, and the economy is subject to strong uncertainties, even more so in the context of a changing climate, growing economies, evolving societies, and declining ecosystems. Here we apply a new feature of the CLIMADA climate risk modelling platform, which allows carrying out global uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. We showcase the comprehensive treatment of uncertainty and sensitivity of CLIMADAﾒs outputs for the assessment of future global tropical cyclone (TC) risk. Our results show that socio-economic development contributes more strongly to TC risk increase in the future and is a more uncertain risk driver than climate change. Besides, we find that exposure scaling based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) is the input variable with the most significant impact on TC risk change calculations. In conclusion, we argue that a thorough and systematic assessment of future global TC risk will help focus forthcoming research efforts and enable better-informed adaptation decisions and mitigation strategies.

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Alessio Ciullo

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