engleski

Resilience of Interdependent Critical Infrastructure Networks to the impacts of Climate Change

Climate related hazards and extreme events (e.g. floods, extreme precipitation, wildfires etc.) can damage or substantially affect the lifespan and effective operation of Critical Infrastructures (CI), such as energy, transportation, ICT and water infrastructures. Under climate change, weather extremes are expected to exceed the design specifications for CI more frequently and earlier during the lifetime of an infrastructure, thus decreasing its durability and resilience. Furthermore, modern infrastructures operate as a 'system of systems' with many interactions and interdependencies among them. Damage in one infrastructure system (e.g. ICT) from climatic hazards and extreme events can cascade and result in failures and cascading effects onto all related and dependent infrastructures (e.g. energy and water infrastructures). These critical infrastructure interdependencies have become increasingly complex and require a 'system of systems' approach to assess and understand the nature of impact(s) resulting in failure and cascading effects on to other related infrastructures. To minimise such impacts and reduce risk, it is vital to identify vulnerabilities and improve the resilience of critical infrastructures. The tutorial session will introduce the EU-CIRCLE climate resilience management framework, developed as part of the EU's Horizon2020 programme, the aim of which is to move towards an infrastructure network(s) that is resilient to today's natural hazards and prepared for future climate change. Critical infrastructure Resilience in the context of EU CIRCLE is defined as the ability of a CI system to prevent, withstand, recover and adapt from the effects of climate hazards and climate change. The EU-CIRCLE climate resilience management framework is a novel 4 layered model based on: • Layer 1: identification of the critical assets/processes of an infrastructure network that provides essential services to society i.e. resilience of what ; • Layer 2: determination of the critical values and/or patterns of climate parameters that result in a change of state for these CI assets (in terms of performance or functionality) under current and future climate i.e. resilience to what ; • Layer 3: Risks and Impacts including the analysis of the relative impact, determined using appropriate consequence or damage curves and consequence analysis to determine cascading effects arising from interdependencies (including physical, cyber, geographic, and logical) ; and • Layer 4: analysis of the five types of resilience capacities-anticipative, absorptive, restorative, coping and adaptive capacities-of the CI asset or network which in turn leads to the identification of adaptation plans/programmes/strategies and investment needs to improve resilience to climate change. The 4-layer model is further underpinned by resilience parameters and indicators, which contribute in particular to Layer 4. The resilience parameters and indicators will be demonstrated and their contribution to the practical achievement of climate resilience in CI will be explored. The climate resilience management framework has been operationalised through a diagnostic modelling tool. This tool defines and measures the different resilience capacities and resilience parameters of CI. It can determine the existing resilience level of CI and through making the requisite changes to the resilience parameters and capacities of the model, identify options for improving resilience to climate change. It then assesses how the different adaptation options or measures can impact the individual resilience capacities and hence the overall resilience of CI, in the short and the long run. A live demonstration of the tool will be included in the tutorial session, which will use data from a validation case study. The case study uses system dynamics to simulate the impact of forest fires on the resilience capacities of the electricity network and the road transportation system under a climate change scenario in the year 2040. The strengths and weaknesses of the framework will be discussed, including the work planned for further developing the framework.

Climate changes, Resilience of Infrastructures

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