Climate change risks to US infrastructure: impacts on roads, bridges, coastal development, and urban drainage

Abstract

Changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level, and coastal storms will likely increase the vulnerability of infrastructure across the United States. Using four models that analyze vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation, this paper estimates impacts to roads, bridges, coastal properties, and urban drainage infrastructure and investigates sensitivity to varying greenhouse gas emission scenarios, climate sensitivities, and global climate models. The results suggest that the impacts of climate change in this sector could be large, especially in the second half of the 21st century as sea-level rises, temperature increases, and precipitation patterns become more extreme and affect the sustainability of long-lived infrastructure. Further, when considering sea-level rise, scenarios which incorporate dynamic ice sheet melting yield impact model results in coastal areas that are roughly 70 to 80 % higher than results that do not incorporate dynamic ice sheet melting. The potential for substantial economic impacts across all infrastructure sectors modeled, however, can be reduced by Climatic Change (2015) 131:97-109 DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-1037 This article is part of a Special Issue on "A Multi-Model Framework to Achieve Consistent Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts in the United States" edited by Jeremy Martinich, John Reilly, Stephanie Waldhoff, Marcus Sarofim, and James McFarland. Climate Change Division, USEPA, Washington, DC, USA cost-effective adaptation measures. Mitigation policies also show potential to reduce impacts in the infrastructure sector -a more aggressive mitigation policy reduces impacts by 25 to 35 %, and a somewhat less aggressive policy reduces impacts by 19 to 30 %. The existing suite of models suitable for estimating these damages nonetheless covers only a small portion of expected infrastructure sector effects from climate change, so much work remains to better understand impacts on electric and telecommunications networks, rail, and air transportation systems. In addition, the effects of climate-induced extreme events are likely to be important, but are incompletely understood and remain an emerging area for research.

Climate change damages to Alaska public infrastructure and the economics of proactive adaptation

“…With the exception of buildings in the 2070 era, which may experience delayed damages from near-surface permafrost thaw because of the lower temperature increase under RCP4.5, mean annual projected damages to all infrastructure types were lower under RCP4.5. These findings are consistent with other studies that have found reduced economic impacts under lower GHG emissions scenarios (35,44).…”

U.S. Air Quality and Health Benefits from Avoided Climate Change under Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

“…Under the CIRA framework, these scenarios have been systematically applied to explore different impacts, including water resources, infrastructure, and health. [41][42][43] We examine the effect of climate change and climate policy on U.S. air quality and its associated health risks using the scenarios developed under the CIRA project for consistent analyses of climate impacts. Our modeling framework includes an integrated assessment model, a global atmospheric chemistry model, and a health and economic benefits model.…”

Railway bridge structural health monitoring and fault detection: State-of-the-art methods and future challenges

“…The aim of this section is to illustrate how the different condition monitoring and fault detection methods can be used during the life cycle of the bridge, in order to monitor the evolution of the health state of the bridge over time. A short-span steel bridge is selected due to the fact that short-span bridges are one of the most common structures for railway bridges, and their degradation mechanisms, such as corrosion and cracks, can develop rapidly, once they have been initiated [Chen et al, 1999;AISI, 2007;Psimoulis et al, 2013;Nour et al, 2016;Rocha et al, 2016]. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the behaviour of a short-span railway bridge is strongly influenced by the dynamic characteristics of the track and the dynamic properties of the train that is passing over the bridge [Rocha et al, 2012].…”