The changing climate with resulting more extreme weather events will likely impact infrastructure assets and services. This phenomenon can present direct threats to the assets as well as significant indirect effects for those relying on the services those assets deliver. Such threats are path-dependent and place-specific, as they strongly depend on current and future climate variability, location, asset design life, function and condition. One key question is how climate change is likely to increase both the probability and magnitude of extreme weather events under different scenarios of climate change. To address this issue, this paper investigates selected effects of climate change and their consequences on structural performance, in the context of evolving loading scenarios in three different continental regions: Europe, North America, and Asia. The aim is to investigate some main place-specific changes of the exposure in terms of intensity/frequency of extreme events as well as the associated challenges, considering some recent activities of members of the IABSE TG6.1. Climate change can significantly affect built infrastructure and the society by increasing the occurrence and magnitude of extreme events and increasing potential losses. Therefore, specific relationships relating hazard levels and structural vulnerability to climate change effects should be determined.
The immense impacts of tsunamis can inflict substantial damage on coastal infrastructure systems during their lifetime and lead to considerable economic loss. However, with the increasing intensity and variability of sea‐level rise due to climate change, evaluations of the life‐cycle tsunami risk associated with cumulative loss have become increasingly complex since tsunami hazards are time‐dependent. In addition, the number of earthquake events and the corresponding arrival times are substantially uncertain. Therefore, an accurate life‐cycle tsunami risk assessment methodology should be established to appropriately develop disaster mitigation measures. This paper provides a novel life‐cycle risk assessment of building portfolios subjected to tsunami hazards under non‐stationary sea‐level rise effects due to climate change. The cumulative loss of a building portfolio is evaluated through a compound renewal process based on earthquake interarrival time uncertainties and time‐dependent risk. The earthquake interarrival times are modeled using a non‐Poisson process based on historical data. Tsunami hazard curves that consider the effects of sea‐level rise, estimated based on climate models, are obtained with tsunami propagation analysis. The time‐variant annual risk is estimated based on reliability and building unit loss. Finally, a numerical procedure is proposed to estimate the life‐cycle tsunami risk of building portfolios. An illustrative example is provided by applying the framework to several municipalities in the Kochi Prefecture of Japan to assess the effects of climate change on the life‐cycle tsunami risk.
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