The impacts of coastal flooding and sea level rise on critical infrastructure: a novel storyline approach

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ABSTRACT

This study presents an event-based storyline framework to assess the influence of future climatic and socioeconomic conditions on coastal flood impacts to critical infrastructure. The framework combines well-established quantitative methods of sea level rise, coastal inundation, and critical infrastructure (CI) physical damage assessments into an integrated modelling approach. We apply our approach to re-imagine three historic events: storm Xaver, storm Xynthia , and a storm surge event along the coast of Emilia Romagna (Italy). Our results indicate that northern Germany would benefit mostly from coordinated adaptation action to reduce the flood impact, whereas the southwestern coast of France would find the highest damage reduction through asset-level ‘autonomous’ adaptation action. Our approach helps to improve the scientific understanding of how coastal flood risk are assessed and best managed, and forces a distillation of the science into an accessible narrative to support policymakers and asset owners to make progress towards more climate-resilient coastal communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• storylines
• sea level rise
• flooding
• adaptation

Disclosure statement

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) reviewed the anonymised abstract of the article, but had no role in the peer review process nor the final editorial decision.

Additional information

Funding

The Article Publishing Charge (APC) for this article is funded by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI). This research was carried out and funded as part of the EU Horizon-2020 project RECEIPT (Grant Agreement No: 820712). Elco Koks was further supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; grant no. VI.Veni.194.033).

Notes on contributors

Elco E. Koks

Elco E. Koks is an Assistant Professor within the department of Water and Climate Risk at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). His research combines knowledge from disaster impact modelling, critical infrastructure, network analysis and macroeconomics.

D. Le Bars

D. Le Bars works as a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in the R&D Weather and Climate modelling group. His work focuses on improving our understanding of the dominant processes which drive sea level changes and in improving sea level rise projections.

A.H Essenfelder

A. H. Essenfelder is a scientific project officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). He is an environmental engineer by training and holds a Ph.D. in Science and Management of Climate Change obtained at the Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His main research interests are on development and application of AI/ML methods for disaster risk reduction, and on risk modelling under a perspective of dynamic climate.

S. Nirandjan

S. Nirandjan is employed as a PhD candidate within the department of Water and Climate Risk at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She works on multi-hazard exposure and vulnerability of critical infrastructure across the globe.

P. Sayers

P. Sayers is a Chartered Engineer and leads Sayers and Partners. Paul led the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment future flood projections research and continues to be involved in large scale analysis of present and future flood risks and associated investment planning in Europe and internationally.