Escalating impacts of climate extremes on critical infrastructures in Europe

Floods and debris flows pose a significant threat, especially when extreme rain falls over burned areas. This is an example of a compound event in which two concurrent or consecutive events lead to extreme societal impacts. Compound and cascading hazards are becoming increasingly important and have notable impacts on threatened communities across the world. Wildfire followed by an intense precipitation event can result in a large flood under which the combined impacts of hazard drivers are much more intense than those from individual drivers. Here, we first quantify the change in exposure of natural gas infrastructure to individual hazards, wildfire and floods in the future relative to past. We, then quantify the compound hazards as coincidence likelihood of intense rain over burned areas and analyze the spatial patterns across the State of California, USA. Our results show that not only the exposure of natural gas infrastructure to individual hazards would be higher, the likelihood of compound hazards is expected to increase substantially in a warming climate.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Increasing exposure of energy infrastructure to compound hazards: cascading wildfires and extreme rainfall

Moftakhari

AghaKouchak

2019

“…One example of potential grey infrastructure damage is the pavement degradation of roads, which tends to accelerate when the temperature rises beyond the suitable range of the selected pavement material. Because stationary future climate was often assumed when selecting materials, emissions-warming alone has been shown to severely accelerate pavement degradation in the United States and Europe by mid-century, costing extra tens of billions US$ (Underwood et al 2017, Forzieri et al 2018. In these regions, costs from pavement degradation will rise even higher considering the expansion-warming forecasted there will be >70% as strong as the emissions-warming ( figure 4).…”

Section: Implications For Grey and Green Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island intensification through 2050

Huang

et al. 2019

254

105

Urban populations are expected to increase by 2-3 billion by 2050, but we have limited understanding of how future global urban expansion will affect urban heat island (UHI) and hence change the geographic distributions of extreme heat risks. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic global projections of UHI intensification due to urban land expansion through 2050. Our projections show that urban land areas are expected to expand by 0.6-1.3 million km 2 between 2015 and 2050, an increase of 78%-171% over the urban footprint in 2015. This urban land expansion will result in average summer daytime and nighttime warming in air temperature of 0.5°C-0.7°C, up to ∼3°C in some locations. This warming is on average about half, and sometimes up to two times, as strong as that caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (multi-model ensemble average projections in Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5). This extra urban expansion-induced warming, presented here, will increase extreme heat risks for about half of the future urban population, primarily in the tropical Global South, where existing forecasts already indicate stronger GHG emissions-warming and lack of adaptive capacity. In these vulnerable urban areas, policy interventions to restrict or redistribute urban expansion and planning strategies to mitigate UHIs are needed to reduce the wide ranges of impacts on human health, energy system, urban ecosystem, and infrastructures.

“…Mitchell et al 2018), or for specific climate hazards, such as river floods (e.g. Dottori et al 2018), coastal storms and sea level rise (Vousdoukas et al 2018), and multi-hazard (Forzieri et al 2018). Studies that have assessed the integrated economic effects of climate change, on the other hand, are rare.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing future climate change impacts in the EU and the USA: insights and lessons from two continental-scale projects*

Cı́scar

Rising

Kopp

et al. 2019

Self Cite

Climate change will impact many economic sectors and aspects of natural and human wellbeing. Quantifying these impacts as they vary across regions, sectors, time, and social and climatological scenarios supports detailed planning, policy, and risk management. This article summarises and compares recent climate impact assessments in Europe (the JRC PESETA III project) and the USA (the American Climate Prospectus project). Both implement a multi-sector perspective combining high resolution climate data with sectoral impact and economic models. The assessments differ in their coverage of sectors and scenarios, mix of empirical and process-based methods, handling of uncertainty, and representation of damages. Despite the dissimilarities, projected relative economic impacts are comparable, with human mortality as the dominant impact category. Both studies further show a large spatial heterogeneity of impacts that may amplify pre-existing economic inequality in the EU and US, and that mitigation can considerably reduce economic impacts. The comparison highlights the various decision-points involved in interdisciplinary climate impact modelling and lessons learnt in both projects, on the basis of which we provide recommendations for further research.