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Concepts

Key domain terms and definitions used throughout Climate-Lama.

Hazard

A natural or human-induced phenomenon with the potential to cause harm. Examples include tropical cyclones, river floods, heatwaves, and wildfires. In CLIMADA terms, a hazard is characterised by its intensity at each location and time step.

Exposure

The inventory of people, assets, or systems present in hazard-prone areas. Exposure data describe what is at risk — buildings, infrastructure, crops, populations — and their economic or social value.

Vulnerability

The propensity of an exposed element to be adversely affected by a hazard. Expressed as an impact function (or vulnerability curve) that maps hazard intensity to fractional damage.

Impact

The modelled consequence of a hazard event on an exposed, vulnerable system. Impact can be expressed in monetary loss, affected population, or other domain-specific units.

Risk

The combination of hazard probability, exposure, and vulnerability over time. Climate-Lama computes risk as expected annual impact (EAI) and provides exceedance-probability curves.

Adapter

The software component that translates Climate-Lama job requests into calls to a specific compute engine (e.g., climate-lama-engine). The adapter pattern keeps the API and core service engine-agnostic.

Job

An asynchronous compute task submitted via the API. Jobs are queued in Redis, executed by the Celery worker, and results are stored in MinIO. Clients poll for job status and retrieve results by job ID.

ADR (Architecture Decision Record)

A lightweight document capturing a significant design choice: context, decision, alternatives considered, and rationale. Climate-Lama's ADRs live in docs/DECISIONS.md.

Further reading

  • Discounting — how future losses are discounted in cost-benefit analysis.
  • EIOPA scenario mapping — which concrete datasets realize the EIOPA ORSA below-2°C / well-above-2°C climate scenarios, per hazard and horizon.
  • Greek historical catalog — sources, method, and limitations behind the full-Greece river-flood layer, the wildfire/windstorm gaps, and the curated building-stock exposure proxy beyond LitPop.
  • ORSA climate module — what the scenario-matrix report pack is, what it is NOT (physical-risk only, self-set score bands, current gaps), and how a consultant/actuary uses it to complete a filing. See also the walkthrough.