Building Systemic Risk Assessment Tools for Climate Adaptation Assessment in the Caribbean – Case Study for Jamaica

The Caribbean islands are extremely vulnerable to extreme storms and floods. Infrastructure systems, including energy, transport and water supply networks, are often disproportionately exposed and vulnerable to such extremes. Climate hazard impacts can be propagated through infrastructure networks far away from places where the extreme event hit. Post-disaster repairing and replacing of infrastructures can take months or even years, denying people of essential services and adding to financial burdens on governments. Caribbean countries have large stock of existing infrastructure, mostly not been designed to cope with the threat of climate change. New infrastructure is also needed in the Caribbean islands, to spur sustainable economic development. Most of the Caribbean islands are small, where space is limited, and hence investments made in hazard prone areas cannot be avoided. It is therefore essential that extreme climate change is factored into infrastructure planning right from the outset.

To address the above challenges systemic spatial risk assessment is needed to map locations of vulnerable infrastructure assets and quantify their socio-economic impacts. Such systemic risk assessment involves: (1) Assembling multi-hazard datasets under different climate scenarios – including return period maps and probabilistic event sets; (2) Creating spatial network flow models of interdependent energy and transport systems – that could help understand flow rerouting during disruptions; (3) Mapping infrastructure vulnerability hotspots to quantify direct damages from hazards; (4) Quantifying indirect economic losses through network disruptions; (5) Creating effective resilience interventions for risk reduction; (6) Optimisation of resilience intervention by comparing systemic resilience costs and benefits to help prioritise investments in long-term climate adaptation.

The proposed application of the problem is presented through a Jamaica Systemic Risk Assessment Tool (J-SRAT), which is a decision support platform for evaluation and prioritisation of policies and options to reduce climate risks and losses and enhance infrastructure resilience. The tool is being used to build capacity within the Government of Jamaica (GoJ) and other relevant public and private stakeholders for infrastructure risk analysis and adaptation decision making. We present the on-going advances made for Jamaica and its wider applications for the Caribbean Islands.