Flood and Wind-Induced Basic Service Disruptions across the Globe - A Modelling Approach

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, disruptions to basic services, such as access to healthcare, electricity, and mobility, may severely impact the functioning of society.  As both infrastructure investments and occurrence of extreme weather and climate events are at an all-time high, critical infrastructures are more exposed than ever to such adverse phenomena. While societal impacts of basic service disruptions can be substantial and widely felt, this aspect of risk is rarely captured in classic risk assessments. In this contribution, we are shedding light on this wider, socio-technical dimension of natural hazard-induced risks, in a globally consistent manner.

For a selection of countries differing in size, world region, population density and income group, we compute spatially explicit patterns of basic service disruptions (access to power, healthcare, education, mobility and telecommunications) caused by historically observed tropical cyclone and flood events, and repeat the assessment with events commensurate with climate chance projections. To this end, we use the open-source risk assessment platform CLIMADA [1] and a bespoke network modelling approach relying on real-world infrastructure and population data [2]. We highlight geographic risk hotspots and demonstrate the importance of considering system interdependencies and cascading failures as opposed to static damage estimates to capture infrastructure risks from a human-centric perspective. Further, we study the influence of (country-specific) infrastructure network characteristics to develop heuristics (“rules of thumb”) of determinants which either perpetuate failure cascades or contribute to resilience.

First results indicate, among others, that i) basic services which heavily rely on supporting infrastructure (such as healthcare and education access) are more likely to be disrupted, ii) floods cause different service disruption patterns than strong winds, iii) locations where service disruptions are experienced may diverge from locations with highest hazard intensities.

 

[1] Aznar-Siguan, G. and D.N. Bresch (2019) CLIMADA v1: A Global Weather and Climate Risk Assessment Platform. Geoscientific Model Development 2 (7): 3085–9. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd- 12-3085-2019 

[2] Mühlhofer, E., E. E. Koks, C. M. Kropf, G.  Sansavini and D. N. Bresch. (in review). “A Generalized Natural Hazard Risk Modelling Framework for Infrastructure Failure Cascades.” https://doi.org/10.31223/X54M17