Recovery time and exposure for six harmonized extreme climate event categories under global warming

Climate variability gives rise to different extreme events, including crop failure, drought, flood, heatwave, tropical cyclone, and wildfire. The temporal and spatial characteristics of these events have already begun to shift, and are expected to change further under continued global warming. In studies of climate change impacts, different types of events are often studied in isolation. However, locations exposed to extreme events are typically not only affected by a single extreme event category. We therefore quantify exposure and mean recovery times for six different extreme event types on a 0.5°×0.5° global grid under historical and projected future climates. We use harmonized ensembles of global biophysical impact simulations driven with (i) bias-adjusted climate data, to assess current conditions, and (ii) climate model projections, to quantify future changes in recovery times. While we observe a decrease in global mean recovery time as a function of warming level across all event types, the decrease rates differ strongly between event types ranging from constant to flattening rates. Being able to quantify the temporal evolution of recovery times is crucial for disaster planning and adaptation or relocation efforts.