Building quantitative and qualitative archetypes of households to assess vulnerability to flood and heat-related risks in Austria

Climate change interacts with a multitude of social structures, determining individual risk and coping capacities. Existing socio-economic impact assessments of climate risk commonly focus on aggregate levels, such as GDP, leaving severe blind spots with respect to within-country distributional effects of climate change impacts. While research addressing this gap remains scarce, a profound understanding of social vulnerabilities across societal groups and the integration of these insights in impact and adaptation assessments is key for effective adaptation policy processes. Our study extends upon previous research assessing socioeconomic aggregates by shedding light on distributional effects of flood and heat-related climate risks within the Austrian society. We explore differential vulnerabilities and the patterns determining heterogeneities among agents through developing household archetypes. As this requires impact assessments to move beyond representing average regional effects, we bring together two ends of the spectrum: namely the generic representation of a single representative household and highly context specific risk determinants of individual households, by means of identifying recurring patterns.