The first step to improving resilience of Critical Infrastructure (CI) to climate change impacts is the identification of the risks of several climate hazards to interconnected and interdependent CIs i.e. risk assessment.
The EU-CIRCLE risk assessment framework includes:
• Assessment of the current risks of a specific climate hazard to a single CI or a CI network or even an area of interest with interconnected and interdependent CI.
• Examination of how climate change may alter risk in the future, or expose new risks. This analysis includes a baseline assessment of the risks to CI assuming no additional adaptation actions under various climate change scenarios, as well as a second assessment which considers how current or future potential adaptation actions will affect the overall scale of risk to CIs in the future under the same climate change scenarios.
• Identification of climate change adaptation or risk mitigation options and definition of priorities. This step examines alternative strategies for mitigating risks to CI and strengthening their resilience such as: enhancing the defences of interconnected infrastructures and implementation of long term adaptation options.
A comparative assessment of these scenarios using well identified criteria (e.g. cost – benefit analysis) will return scientific evidence for supporting informed decision making.
The EU-CIRCLE Risk Modelling Framework is set out in Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: EU-CIRCLE Risk Modelling Framework
View all outputs from this work package
D3.4 Holistic CI Climate Hazard Risk Assessment Framework V1.0