Due to human-caused climate change, the Austrian population is increasingly affected by extreme weather events. With the annually published Climate Status Report, we aim to show how these extreme weather events relate to climate change and what impacts they have year after year on society and the environment across large parts of Austria.
The annually published Climate Status Report Austria is produced on behalf of the Climate and Energy Fund and all nine federal states by the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) in collaboration with GeoSphere Austria (GSA) and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), with the involvement of numerous other research institutions.
In its first year of publication, the Climate Status Report 2017 focused on the topic of late frosts.
For the year 2018, the Climate Status Report took up the key topic of "heat and drought".
The Climate Status Report 2019 takes a closer look at extreme precipitation events in November and their impacts across Austria, as well as preventive adaptation options in response to the consequences of extreme precipitation events (flooding, mudflows, avalanches).
The Climate Status Report 2020 for Austria analyses the new 30-year climate normal period (1991–2020) and shows how the climate in Austria has already changed in just 30 years — that is, between the previous reference period of 1961–1990 and the new one of 1991–2020.
The Climate Status Report for the year 2021 highlights the consequences of locally occurring, severe thunderstorms in Austria and the enormous damage potential they carry due to their difficulty to predict.
The key topic of the Climate Status Report 2022 is glacier melt, which was particularly dramatic in 2022 — during the summer of 2022, Austrian glaciers lost around twice as much mass as in the average of the previous 30 years.
In the Climate Status Report 2023, we address the large-scale, prolonged precipitation events in August and how, given the extraordinary scale of the rainfall as well as the interplay of changing conditions, we are increasingly reaching the limits of local adaptation options.
The fact that higher temperatures increase the likelihood of extreme precipitation was clearly demonstrated in autumn 2024. The Climate Status Report 2024 focuses on Storm Low "Anett" in mid-September, which caused unprecedented levels of rainfall and devastating flooding across central Europe.
The Climate Status Report 2025 takes up the topic of groundwater in the context of climate change and presents targeted adaptation measures to address the challenges facing our water resources.
Since 2019, climate retrospectives have also been compiled for all nine federal states!
