1 Introduction

Socio‐economic activities in the present world are increasing their interdependencies because of rapid technological progress, urbanization, and the globalization among others (World Economic Forum, 2018). Awareness has been raised that the natural world—for example, ecosystems susceptible to climate change—is a system comprising interwoven processes affecting one another (Scheffer et al., 2001). The Earth system as a whole, a dense network of interrelated processes, may exhibit strongly nonlinear responses and unexpected behaviors (Lenton et al., 2008; Steffen et al., 2018). There is a dire need to understand the resilience of such complex systems.

Climate risks may ripple through sectors in the present interdependent world, posing a challenge ahead of us to maintain the resilience of the system (Helbing, 2013). Being consistent with the way in which International Risk Governance Council (2005) defines risks, we use this term to refer to both positive and negative potential impacts of climate change on various ecosystems and human society. The risks of climate change can be transmitted and amplified through multiple direct and indirect pathways (Liu et al., 2015; Pidgen et al., 2003). A combination of interacting processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales can result in extreme impacts (Leonard et al., 2014). The magnitudes of risks may be significantly underestimated if we fail to consider their interconnections (Challinor et al., 2017). Several efforts in this regard have been made, but these have been mostly at the country or regional level. For example, the Third National Climate Assessment conducted in the United States analyzed the domestic impacts of climate change on cross‐sectoral systems and the cascading effects across sectors (Jacobs et al., 2016). The UK's Second Climate Change Risk Assessment (UKCCRA2) systematically assessed the risks to the UK posed by climate change (Challinor et al., 2016). The UKCCRA2 reports are not intended to provide comprehensive visualizations nor assessments of interactions; rather, they serve to identify particular areas where government policies need to be coordinated and aligned (Street et al., 2016). The fourth report for the assessment of climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe (Lung et al., 2017) reviewed the ways in which the impact of climate change in one sector affects other sectors across the continent. In another Europe‐focused study, Harrison et al. (2016) showed that single‐sector studies tend to misrepresent the magnitude of climate‐sensitive impacts because they omit the complex interdependencies within human and environmental systems. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) identified a number of global climate risks (Birkmann et al., 2014; Hewitson et al., 2014; Oppenheimer et al., 2014). The IPCC AR5, however, classified the global and regional risks according to regions and sectors, and the causal chain of climate risks has not been examined systematically nor visualized effectively.

A user‐friendly visualization of interconnected climate risks can serve as a powerful way to deliver climate risk information to the general public (Herring et al., 2016). Visualization has long been known to have a variety of cognitive benefits when compared to written information (Sheppard, 2005). Visualizing the chains of risk transmission in a clear and compelling way is likely to help the layman better understand the broad scope of climate risks. Whereas network visualizations have been used in fields such as economics, linguistics, computer science, and biology (Lima, 2011), few attempts have been made in the context of climate change.

In this paper, we present a first step toward the goal of effectively visualizing climate risks and their cause–effect relationships based on a survey of literature. In doing so, we generated a database of climate risks and their interconnections on a global scale. Working with a visualization expert, we developed a practical methodology for visualizing chains of climate risks. The visualized network is intended as a communication tool to educate stakeholders and to help raise awareness of the complex and interconnected nature of climate impacts.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 describes the methods of our literature survey and visualization of climate risk interconnections. Section 3 presents the visualized networks of risk interconnections. Section 4 discusses the implications of our visualization approach and reports the outcome of the test use of our visualized products. The paper is concluded in section 5.