engleski

The role of climate data in assessing critical infrastructure resilience to climate change

Large scale infrastructures (energy, transport, water, ICT) and facilities are critical for the functioning of the modern European societies, but they are also exposed to hydrological and meteorological risks so their operation may be severely devastated in case of the natural hazards. The objective of the European Horizon2020 project EU-CIRCLE is to move towards infrastructure network(s) that is resilient to today’s natural hazards and prepared for the future changing climate. Furthermore, modern infrastructures are inherently interconnected and interdependent systems: thus extreme events can lead to cascading failures of several interconnected systems. The presented study describes the methodological approach on how climate data may be introduced into a holistic risk and resiliency framework for assessing the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructures. Within the EU-CIRCLE approach, the risk on infras- tructures from a specific climate hazard is quantified as the probability of occurrence of the climate hazard and the impact it causes to the infrastructure and the society. The proposed approach starts from the generation or collection of climate information that is needed in order to address related scientific questions, such as: (1) how resilient are transport networks to the 500-year-return-period flooding event or, (2) what is the risk for electricity networks under changing climate conditions in a specific region. The orchestrated use of different data sets and their fusion is proposed that would allow responding to those scientific questions. These data sets are used to generate specific indicators based on climate information, including the operational characteristics of the infrastructure systems when required depending on the type of infrastructure. The proposed approach relates the question under examination to a threshold value that is related to extreme events, change in trends, etc. The correlation of the threshold with the climate information is used to provide an estimation of the probability of occurrence of the risk, and it can be further classified into descriptive terms in accordance to the national risk assessment plans. To estimate the impacts from the hazard, the damage function methodological approach is used with climate data as an input together with the secondary models, depending on the risk under examination (these include forest fire spreading models, flooding models, etc). Some case studies across Europe will be presented, testing the validity of the proposed approach, by including forest fires in South France, flooding in the UK and Central Europe and storm surge in the Baltic Sea.

EU-CIRCLE, critical infrastructure

EU-CIRCLE