Documentation for physrisk#
This website contains the documentation for physrisk, a calculation engine for physical climate risk.
Physical risk and resilience#
Physrisk is a library for assessing the physical effects of climate change and thereby the potential benefit of measures to improve resilience. Physrisk is primarily designed to run ‘bottom-up’ calculations that model the impact of climate hazards on large numbers of individual assets (including natural). These calculations can be used to assess financial risks or socio-economic impacts. To do this physrisk collects:
hazard indicators and
models of the vulnerability of assets to hazards.
Hazard indicators, that is quantities that quantify a hazard, are on-boarded from public data sets or inferred from climate projections, e.g. from CMIP or CORDEX data sets. In both cases, indicator data is created from code in the hazard repo, open-source to make the data lineage as transparent as possible.
The physrisk repo contains the main calculation engine.
Physrisk is also designed to be a hosted, e.g. to provide on-demand calculations; the project is a co-operative of members some of whom need to integrate physical risk calculation into other systems. physrisk-api and physrisk-ui provide an example API and user interface.
A development or ‘sandbox’ version of the UI is hosted by OS-Climate. Although used for demonstration and test, this is a useful way to explore the available hazard data.
Also see the OSC webpage
The getting-started section contains a number of examples that provide a walk-through of physrisk’s functionality, via API then running locally. The methodology document gives a more detailed introduction to the subject and describes the models in more formal detail. The user-guide describes the design and conventions of physrisk and implementation detail for sourcing hazard indicator and vulnerability data; it is there, and in the code, that the details of data sources can be found.
