Algorithm for Economic Assessment of Infrastructure Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change, along with the increase of severe weathers and natural disasters, is becoming an important factor to consider for infrastructure investments. To adapt infrastructure to the effects of climate change, new design, construction, or rehabilitation methods -so-called adaptation methods -can be deployed. However, it is crucial to understand the impact of adaptation methods on infrastructure before they are actually implemented. When the economic benefit and cost are clear, asset managers can confidently make informed decisions about the priority of investment alternatives. This paper proposes an integrated algorithm to assess the benefit and cost of adaptation methods. The "integrated" aspect of the algorithm is derived from the fact that climate change effects on infrastructure can be divided into two categories. One is sudden extreme weather events caused by climate change; this sudden event leads to swift and disruptive damages to infrastructure. The other is a gradual climate change of which effects are shown over a long period of time. The algorithm combines the two different aspects of climate change to estimate the net benefit of adaption methods in an integrated manner. Future climate scenarios are first assumed and their input variables are determined for further procedures. With extreme events such as supertyphoon, the procedure for sudden failure of infrastructure is used to estimate the cost and benefit of the rehabilitation effort. Maintenance cost under gradual climate change is also estimated with the climate change adjusted deterioration curve for the infrastructure of interest. Finally, the above three steps are repeated for each year to estimate the life cycle cost infrastructure adaptation to climate change for the comparison of the costs with and without adopting the adaptation method.

Changing Ocean, Marine Ecosystems, and Dependent Communities

“…Built infrastructure impacts are most frequently addressed through hard engineering approaches including: construction of groins, seawalls, revetments, gabions and breakwaters (Friedrich and Kretzinger, 2012;Vikolainen et al 2017); improving drainage and raising the height of roadways and other fixed-location infrastructure (Perkins et al 2015;Becker et al 2016;Colin et al 2016;Asadabadi and Miller-Hooks, 2017;Brown et al 2018a); erosion control systems (Jeong et al 2014); and the relocation of infrastructure (Friedrich and Kretzinger, 2012;Colin et al 2016). Nature-based responses are increasingly being reported as complementary and supporting tools (van der Nat et al 2016;Kabisch et al 2017;Gracia et al 2018) using ecological engineering (Perkins et al 2015;van der Nat et al 2016;Moosavi, 2017) combined with innovative construction strategies (Moosavi, 2017).…”

“…When implemented together, hard and soft engineering responses provide social (Gracia et al 2018;Martínez et al 2018;Woodruff, 2018) and ecological (Perkins et al 2015;van der Nat et al 2016;Gracia et al 2018) co-benefits with reduced damage costs (Jeong et al 2014). Constraints on implementation include the space and extra cost required by ecological infrastructure, sub-optimal performance when impacted by natural physical processes that are disrupted (Gracia et al 2018) or restrictions associated with governance (Vikolainen et al 2017).…”

Valuation of Adaptation Technology to Climate Change Based on Target Classification

“…1, an algorithm for economic assessment of infrastructure adaptation to climate change has been established (Jeong et al 2014). The algorithm estimates benefit of climate change adaptation in two types of damages: sudden damage by extreme weather events and increase of maintenance costs by gradual climate change.…”

“…This paper presents two modules for valuation of adaptation technology based on the algorithm presented by Jeong et al (2014). One module is for extreme weather events and the other for gradual climate change.…”