The use of Consequence forecasting to quantify the impact of climate change on society (OP2249)

The effective functioning of society is critically dependent on having a working critical infrastructure (transport, communication, electricity networks etc). Currently there is not a robust strategy for determining how a future climate may affect our infrastructure and so deciding the best climate adaptation strategy to implement for critical infrastructure is far from straightforward [1]. Climate change adaptation for infrastructure requires a multifaceted approach that can not only estimate the likelihood of future weather events (the hazard) but also their impacts on our built environment (risk), and the societal consequences of these impacts (cascading risk) so that a range of robust adaptation strategies can be explored [3]. This project will use the latest generation of convection permitting climate models to answer the question “What changes do we need to make to our built environment to ensure that we are not vulnerable to future climate extremes?” It will do so by extending a forecasting methodology known as Consequence Forecasting so that it can provide probabilistic projections of both future climate impacts on infrastructure and the societal consequences of these impacts. The work will demonstrate the validity of the framework by applying it to a real infrastructure network (e.g. electricity network) threatened by future climate (e.g. windstorms or floods) and therefore provide a proof of concept for climate impact quantification.