Klimasensitive

Klimasensitive is a German adjective used to describe systems, sectors, or assets that are particularly affected by or dependent on climatic conditions or climate change. In policy, business, and research, the term signals heightened vulnerability or responsiveness to weather patterns, extreme events, or long-term shifts in climate.

The concept is applied across a range of domains. In agriculture, crops can be climate-sensitive to temperature, precipitation, and drought; in urban planning and infrastructure, heat, flooding, and storms create climate-sensitive performance and reliability concerns; in energy and water management, demand and supply respond to climate variability. In finance and insurance, climate-sensitive exposures influence risk assessment and capital allocation.

Assessment typically involves combining exposure to climatic factors with the inherent sensitivity of the system, often within vulnerability or risk frameworks. Methods include scenario analysis, sensitivity indices, and impact modeling, sometimes alongside assessments of adaptive capacity to determine overall resilience.

Relation to other terms: climate sensitivity is a well-established term in climate science describing the response of the global climate to forcing, while climate resilience or adaptation denotes reducing sensitivity or increasing adaptive capacity. Klimasensitive, when used in policy or corporate reporting, often emphasizes vulnerability and the need for adaptation measures rather than resilience alone. Critics note that the term can be vague without explicit definitions of the affected asset, mechanism, and metric.

See also: climate vulnerability, climate risk, adaptation, resilience, risk management.