Energy and Meteorology Portal

Global Risk Atlas

About

The WMO global energy resilience atlas is designed to inform decision-making at a country level by providing insight into the expected changes of precipitation patterns and to better understand the climate risk of the installed capacity caused by change in frequency and intensity of extreme events.

Climate risks are calculated with monthly precipitation data from both ERA5 and CMIP6 climate projections using the three following Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) climate scenarios:

  • SSP126: Sustainability – Taking the Green Road (Low challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
  • SSP245: Middle of the Road (Medium challenges to mitigation and adaptation)
  • SSP585: Fossil fuelled Development (High challenges to mitigation and adaptation)

 

Four climate hazards have been selected focusing each on a particular shift in precipitation pattern. For each of them an Hydro Risk Index (HRI) is computed:

  1. Trend Index (Mean Annual Precipitation): Information regarding overall water availability
  2. Variability Index (Precipitation Variability): With increasing variability the likelihood of extreme events will increase
  3. Drought Index (Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using drought criteria)
  4. Wet Index (Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using flood criteria)
Scientific Background

For further details about the methodology, please refer to the scientific article here

Energies 2024, 17(12), 2947; https://doi.org/10.3390/en17122947

Usage

The Hydro Risk Indeces provide complementary information that, when synergistically utilized, can enhance decision-making outcomes and assist long-term planning on future energy mixes considering risk based on the most likely climate scenarios.

The results are per country, so a plant with high hazard values but low contribution to the total installed capacity will have a smaller contribution to the countries’ HRI than a plant with a smaller hazard but a bigger installed capacity.  

For example, a country can have:

  • No change on the HRI for annual precipitation but a high HRI for variability could expect to receive the same amount of rain in a shorter period of time or prolonged dry periods followed by persistent rain.
  • A reduction in the annual mean HRI, low variability and extreme SPI dry HRI, could expect to have an established drought.
  • Reduced annual mean HRI, with high variability HRI variability and extreme SPI dry, but also bigger SPI wet HRI than the historical periods, could expect mostly dry conditions but expect some flash floods.