Advances in Climate Adaptation Modeling of Infrastructure Networks

Abstract

As the adverse effects of climate change are increasingly becoming unavoidable, calls for improving climate adaptation assessments have gathered interest at the global scale. Infrastructure policymakers and practitioners are now interested in understanding climate vulnerabilities and risks that capture the systemic nature of failure propagation seen across interconnected networks. This would help inform adaptation planning objectives meant to improve systemic resilience. This paper presents recent technical methodological and tool-based advances made in climate vulnerability, risk, and adaptation modeling of large-scale infrastructure networks. These methodologies adopt a bottom-up approach that focuses on creating data-rich representations of infrastructure network attributes, resource flows, and socio-economic indicators that are all used for quantifying direct and indirect risks to network assets exposed to extreme climate hazards at multiple scales. Insights from different case studies are presented to show how such methodologies have been used in practice for informing different policy needs. The paper concludes by identifying the existing gaps and future opportunities for such bottom-up infrastructure network vulnerability, risk, and adaptation assessment methodologies.