But as our climate continues to warm, its baseline is shifting. How these hazards and their causes interact is therefore also changing fast, challenging the very definition of extreme weather events.
The interconnections between extreme weather events have, until recently, been largely overlooked by the science community. But there is now growing international research tasked with mapping these complex relationships.
‘COMPOUND EVENTS’
Compound events – a term only adopted by the IPCC in 2012 – describe the outcomes of a combination of causes that ultimately surpass the capacity of an underlying system to cope.
These include events where a hazard like a wildfire was made worse by something which had preconditioned the environment, like drought.
Wariness of these compound events should influence the way we live our lives in a warmer world.
More research across disciplines is needed, as well as new approaches to disaster risk assessment and climate change adaptation that look across all weather-driven hazards and their complex and changing interactions.
Improvements in climate modelling mean we can do more of this type of science – the climate crisis dictates that we must.
Christopher J White is Head of the Centre for Water, Environment, Sustainability & Public Health, University of Strathclyde. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.