Weather events can be tragic and costly to everyone with a stake in the built environment. Each time extreme rainfall brings destructive flooding, a prolonged heat or cold spell sets back operations and raises costs, wildfires damage facilities and affect air quality, or storm winds and sea level surges damage port facilities, ships, and cargo, is climate change involved in the likelihood and severity?

Facility management has become a principal contributor in recognizing, mitigating, recovering from and adapting to weather events. Climate change can be expected to influence extreme weather likelihood and severity, but extreme weather is not necessarily brought all or in part by climate. When is climate change a decisive factor in consideration of resilience of the demand organization? A series of three brief non-technical papers from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science introduces the subject of attributing extreme weather to climate change:

  1. Attribution science basics: climate change and extreme weather

  2. How attribution science works

  3. Extreme events attributable to climate change: past and future

The field has accelerated during the most recent decade as meteorological science works with increasing volumes of data and complex models.

In 2015, a group of meteorological scientists formed the World Weather Attribution Initiative (WWA) with the objective of determining promptly whether a weather event could be confidently attributed to climate change.

Each WWA study tries to answer three key questions:

  1. How did climate change influence the intensity of the event?

  2. How did climate change influence the likelihood of the event occurring?

  3. How did pre-existing vulnerability worsen the impacts of the event?

Their methods enable asking questions such as whether a “100 year” event might still be just that, or whether another occurrence could be expected in a much shorter time with climate change in the picture. WWA has performed more than 50 studies in cases of extreme rainfall, heat and cold, drought and storms, in locations across the world.

While attribution science is a broadly developed meteorological field, utility for the built environment, where management and investors must make critical choices about risks and resilience, requires communication beyond scientific analysis. A rational basis for practical use depends on developing and communicating policy-relevant information. A comprehensive 2020 paper, develop a protocol - since applied - to select and render attribution study information and results into useful forms to support decision making and communication across stakeholders.

FM, demand organizations, and investors in the built environment can gain advantages in risk management by knowing whether an extreme weather event can be confidently attributed to climate change. Is the event and others of the same sort more (or possibly less) likely with changing climate than before? WWA is making attribution feasible and expressible in practical terms to use in guiding policy and to support planning and provisions that favor resilience.