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This document provides a summary of a hackathon event organized by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Aon, a reinsurance company, to explore the social impacts of climate change. The hackathon focused on developing consistent scenarios for future climate risk, understanding uncertainties in European windstorm modeling, and providing real-time context for extreme weather events. The teams developed tools and methodologies to assess the severity and potential impact of extreme events on insured losses. The collaboration between the MoJ, Aon, and participants from various institutions aims to further research and develop papers and grant proposals in these areas. [Extracted from the article]

Exposure to air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is known to cause diseases and cancers. Consequently, the public are increasingly seeking health warnings associated with levels of PM2.5 using mobile phone applications and websites. Often, these existing platforms provide one-size-fits-all guidance, not incorporating user specific personal preferences. This study demonstrates an innovative approach using Bayesian methods to support personalised decision making for air quality. We present a novel hierarchical spatio-temporal model for city air quality that includes buildings as barriers and captures covariate information. Detailed high resolution PM2.5 data from a single mobile air quality sensor is used to train the model, which is fit using R-INLA to facilitate computation at operational timescales. A method for eliciting multi-attribute utility for individual journeys within a city is then given, providing the user with Bayes-optimal journey decision support. As a proof-of-concept, the methodology is demonstrated using a set of journeys and air quality data collected in Brisbane city centre, Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The city of Exeter, UK, is experiencing unprecedented growth, putting pressure on traffic infrastructure. As well as traffic network management, understanding and influencing commuter behaviour is important for reducing congestion. Information about current commuter behaviour has been gathered through a large on‐line survey, and similar individuals have been grouped to explore distinct behaviour profiles to inform intervention design to reduce commuter congestion. Statistical analysis within societal applications benefit from incorporating available social scientist expert knowledge. Current clustering approaches for the analysis of social surveys assume that the number of groups and the within‐group narratives are unknown a priori. Here, however, informed by valuable expert knowledge, we develop a novel Bayesian approach for creating a clear opposing transport mode group narrative within survey respondents, simplifying communication with project partners and the general public. Our methodology establishes groups characterizing opposing behaviours based on a key multinomial survey question by constraining parts of our prior judgement within a Bayesian finite mixture model. Drivers of group membership and within‐group behavioural differences are modelled hierarchically by using further information from the survey. In applying the methodology we demonstrate how it can be used to understand the key drivers of opposing behaviours in any wider application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazards, such as European windstorms, have widespread effects that result in insured losses at multiple locations throughout a continent. Multivariate extreme-value statistical models for such environmental phenomena must therefore accommodate very high dimensional spatial data, as well as correctly representing dependence in the extremes to ensure accurate estimation of these losses. Ideally one would employ a flexible model, able to characterise all forms of extremal dependence. However, such models are restricted to a few dozen dimensions, hence an a priori diagnostic approach must be used to identify the dominant form of extremal dependence. Here, we present various approaches for exploring the dominant extremal dependence class in very high dimensional spatial hazard fields: tail dependency measures, copula fits, and conceptual loss distributions. These approaches are illustrated by application to a data set of high-dimensional historical European windstorm footprints (6103 spatial maps of 3-day maximum gust speeds at 14 872 locations). We find there is little evidence of asymptotic extremal dependency in windstorm footprints. Furthermore, empirical extremal properties and conceptual losses are shown to be well reproduced using Gaussian copulas but not by extremally dependent models such as Gumbel copulas. It is conjectured that the lack of asymptotic dependence is a generic property of turbulent flows. These results open up the possibility of using geostatistical Gaussian process models for fast simulation of windstorm hazard fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural hazard loss portfolios with exposure over a region are sensitive to the dependency between extreme values of the key hazard variable at different spatial locations. It is therefore important to correctly identify and quantify dependency to avoid poor quantification of risk. This study demonstrates how bivariate extreme value tail dependency methods can be used together in a novel way to explore and quantify extremal dependency in spatial hazard fields. A relationship between dependency and loss is obtained by deriving how the probability distribution of conceptual loss depends on the tail dependency coefficient. The approaches are illustrated by applying them to 6103 historical European windstorm footprints (spatial maps of 3-day maximum gust speeds). We find there is little evidence of asymptotic extremal dependency in windstorm footprints. Furthermore, empirical extremal properties and conceptual loss distributions between pairs of locations are shown to be well reproduced using Gaussian copulas but not by extremally-dependent models such as Gumbel copulas. It is conjectured that the lack of asymptotic dependence is a generic property of turbulent flows, which may extend to other spatially continuous hazards such as heat waves and air pollution. These results motivate the potential of using Gaussian process (geostatistical) models for efficient simulation of hazard fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decline in damaging European windstorms has led to a reduction in insured losses in the 21st century. This decline is explored by identifying a damaging windstorm characteristic and investigating how and why this characteristic has changed in recent years. This novel exploration is based on 6103 high resolution model generated historical footprints (1979-2014) representing the whole European domain. The footprint of a windstorm is defined as the maximum wind gust speed to occur at a set of spatial locations over the duration of the storm. The area of the footprint exceeding 20 ms-1 over land, A20, is shown to be a good predictor of windstorm damage. This damaging characteristic has decreased in the 21st century, due to a statistically significant decrease in the relative frequency of windstorms exceeding 20 ms-1 in north-west Europe. This is explained by a decrease in the quantiles of the footprint wind gust speed distribution above approximately 18 ms-1 at locations in this region. Much of the change in A20 is explained by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The correlation between winter total A20 and winter averaged mean sea-level pressure resembles the NAO pattern, shifted eastwards over Europe, and a strong positive relationship (correlation of 0.715) exists between winter total A20 and winter averaged NAO. The shifted correlation pattern, however, suggests that other modes of variability may also play a role in the variation in windstorm losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]