The impacts of climate change are already being strongly felt in Austria through altered temperature and precipitation patterns as well as an increase in extreme weather events (2nd Austrian Assessment Report, AAR2). This is already generating considerable costs for the public sector today, which will increase as climate change progresses (Bachner and Bednar-Friedl 2018; Bachner et al. 2019; Köppl and Schratzenstaller 2024).
These include expenditure on remedying climate-related damages as well as on climate change adaptation measures, and they affect all federal levels (federal government, states, and municipalities), parafiscal bodies (particularly health and accident insurance), as well as other institutions in the public sector. The impacts of climate change affect all areas of the economy and society, though to varying degrees and through different transmission channels.
For Austria, the first consistent quantification of future climate impact costs across impact fields was carried out in the original COIN study (Steininger et al. 2015). This revealed, on one hand, potential annual impact costs for Austria of over €5 billion by the middle of the century. On the other hand, the large number of identified but unquantified impact pathways gives rise to uncertainties that can be reduced through follow-up studies.
Since then, approaches and models across all impact fields have been further developed for Austria, meaning that more comprehensive quantifications of climate impact costs and various adaptation measures are now available on a more reliable and higher-resolution data basis. However, a consistent integration of these impact fields has not yet taken place. In methodological terms, there have also been significant advances in recent years in the areas of distributional effects, scenario narratives, and synthesised states of knowledge. Deepening work in these areas therefore proves to be a policy-relevant research question for COIN 2.0.