Case study of the cascading effects on critical infrastructure in Torbay coastal/pluvial flooding with climate change and 3D visualisation

Abstract

Critical infrastructures (CIs) are commonly designed, built and maintained based on rigorous standards in order to withstand the climate and weather-related pressures. However, shifts in climate characteristics may result in increases of the magnitude and frequency of potential risks, or expose specific CI to new or increased risks not previously considered. As vital components of the normal functioning of modern societies, their resilience encompasses the operational elements, their structural integrity and the capacity to maximise business output under climate stressors. In this work, we apply an integrated and participatory methodological approach to assess the risk and enhance the resilience of interconnected CIs to urban flooding under climate change. The proposed methodology has been applied to an extended case study in Torbay to extend previous works (Gibson et al. 2018), which seeks to protect coastal communities from future through using the proposed methodology to justify future investment in coastal defences, as a part of the validation of EU-CIRCLE projects developed methodologies.