Assessment of the cost of climate change impacts on critical infrastructure in the circumpolar Arctic

ABSTRACT

The Arctic is experiencing pronounced climatic and environmental changes. These changes pose a risk to infrastructure, impacting the accessibility and development of remote locations and adding additional pressures on local and regional budgets. This study estimates the costs of fixed infrastructure affected by climate change impacts in the Arctic region, specifically on the impacts of permafrost thaw. Geotechnical models are forced by climate data from six CMIP5 models and used to evaluate changes in permafrost geotechnical characteristics between the decades of 2050–2059 and 2006–2015 under the RCP8.5 scenario. Country-specific infrastructure costs are used to estimate the value of infrastructure affected. The results show a 27% increase in infrastructure lifecycle replacement costs across the circumpolar permafrost regions. In addition, more than 14% of total fixed infrastructure assets are at risk of damages due to changes in specific environmental stressors, such as loss of permafrost bearing capacity and thaw subsidence due to ground ice melt. Regions of Northern Canada and Western Siberia are projected to be particularly affected and may require additional annual spending in the excess of 1% of annual GRP to support existing infrastructure into the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Arctic
• infrastructure
• climate change
• permafrost
• economics
• GIS

Acknowledgements

Thanks to faculty and peers at the Department of Geography at The George Washington University, Moscow State University, and many other for their useful inputs. A personal thanks to Professor Robert Orttung for his support, and to Kate O’Brien for her invaluable time spent reading and revising. Many thanks to all reviewers and editors for their constructive and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grants ICER-1558389 and 1717770 'Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: ARCTIC-ERA: ARCTIC climate change and its impact on Environment, infrastructures and Resource Availability', and OISE-1545913 'PIRE: Promoting Urban Sustainability in the Arctic'.The analysis of the Russian Arctic was funded by RFBR project 18-05-60088 'Urban Arctic resilience in the context of climate change and socio-economic transformations'. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or RFBR.