Climate Hazards and Critical Infrastructures Resilience

Abstract

Weather and hydrological extremes, which may be exacerbated by climate variability and change, severely stressed natural, engineered, and human systems. What makes these climate hazards particularly worrisome, however, is their rapidly changing nature, along with our lack of understanding of those hazard attributes that may matter the most for impact analyses. Thus, our understanding of climate variables is less reliable at finer resolutions, and our insights are less credible for extremes such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The interaction of climate hazards with increasing vulnerability, for example, owing to aging of infrastructures, and growing exposure, for example, owing to population growth and increasing rates of urbanization, enhances the challenge. The impacts of climate hazards, and hence preparedness and management of natural hazards as well as climate adaptation and to a great extent mitigation, depend critically on the state of infrastructures. Probabilistic risk assessments, an approach based on threat, vulnerability, and consequences, have long been used to prioritize engineering solutions and resource allocations for developing new or retrofitting existing infrastructures. However, there is a growing realization that a broader community and regional resilience centric perspective may be necessary. The new perspective needs to consider the essential functionality enabled by the infrastructures, as well as brittleness, recovery potential, and risks in terms of those functions. In addition, the perspective would need to consider a holistic framework, which embraces the visualization of critical functions and cascading failures across infrastructure sectors to novel engineering design and standards, along with economic incentives and metrics as well as best practices in organization and governance relevant for preparedness and response.