Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 110, Part C, December 2018, Pages 110-120
Safety Science

Review
Energy critical infrastructures at risk from climate change: A state of the art review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2017.12.022Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This paper reviewed 82 papers related to Climate Change (CC) impacts on Energy Critical Infrastructure (ECI).

  • The papers were reviewed with regards to Critical Infrastructure interdependencies and their effects on ECI resilience to CC.

  • Gaps in the field have been identified and a new framework proposed.

Abstract

Critical Infrastructure Protection is a relatively new scientific domain stemming from an American Presidential directive PDD-63 of May 1998. Critical Infrastructure (CI) performance and protection are national priorities for all European Union (EU) countries following the introduction of the EU Directive 2008/114/EC, which takes an all hazards approach. This paper has an international focus. At the global and European level, the interest in identifying the impacts of climate change on CIs and extreme weather events (EWE) has increased in the last decades, following several high-profile so-called natural disasters. Concern is evidenced by the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the EU Commission’s Staff Working Document on Risk Assessment and Mapping; Guidelines for Disaster Management, SEC (2010) 1626. This paper presents and discusses scientific work which has been published in this area, with a focus on energy CI. The impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on energy CI are initially identified. Important aspects in CI protection such as risk assessment, interdependencies with other sectors, and adaptation/resilience options are subsequently presented and discussed.

Introduction

Changing environmental conditions, such as global climate change, affect living species in a variety of ways. One is through extreme weather conditions like heat waves and floods that have become more frequent (Taylor, 2016). Climate change has as well been implicated in extreme weather events such as the 2003 European heat wave; the Pakistan floods and Russian heat wave in 2010; the recent floods in Europe and the drought in California (Mann et al., 2017). During the last decade alone, the increasing number of natural disasters have affected millions of people across the world (European Climate Adaptation Platform, 2016). Due to the social, technological and environmental interconnectedness of modern societies the impacts created by the changing climate can propagate and create cascading stresses (IPCC, 2012).

Energy infrastructures such as, production and distribution systems, are an area of the built environment vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and natural disasters. Such infrastructures are called critical infrastructures (an umbrella term that also includes transportation, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), water and emergency sectors amongst others) as they are essential for vital societal functions, including the health, safety, security, economic and social well-being of people (Directive 2008/114/EC). History has shown that Energy Critical Infrastructure (ECI) systems can and do fail due to natural disasters or accidental failures with highly consequential impacts to society and the economy (Kyriakides and Polycarpou, 2015). Well-publicized examples include the heatwave in 2003 in Europe, which caused the blackout of many nuclear plants, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which damaged almost 20% of the U.S. refining capacity, and the persistent extreme cold weather in Alaska, which has stopped the oil flow of the Trans-Alaska pipeline system many times during the last 10 years (Sarafoglou et al., 2013). Modern infrastructures operate as a ‘system of systems’ with many interactions, interconnections and interdependencies among these systems. Thus, damage in one infrastructure system can cascade and result in failures and cascading effects onto all related and dependent infrastructures eventually impacting the community and the broader economy (European Climate Adaptation Platform, 2016). Such interconnections can be physical, geographical, cyber or logical (Rinaldi et al., 2001). Addressing and preparing for the challenges to critical infrastructure posed by extreme weather events (EWE) is a priority for EU countries as reflected by the EU Directive 2008/114/EC and the EU Commission’s Risk Assessment and Mapping Guidelines for Disaster Management SEC (2010) 1626.

This paper focuses on ECI and specifically infrastructures in the electricity, oil, gas and renewables sub-sectors. ECIs play a vital role in supporting modern society, and are core to the smooth provision of critical services such as health, water and wastewater, and ICT, among others. (Luiijf et al., 2009). Renewable resources at the time of writing may not be fully considered as ‘critical’ for most European countries since reliance on them is currently low; however, this is likely to change in the future. Climate change risks such as flooding, reduced water supply and extreme temperatures, as well as more frequent and intense storms, will adversely affect energy critical infrastructures, particularly assets of the energy sector (e.g. power stations, electricity substations) that are located in vulnerable areas.

The aim of this paper is to review the literature on the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on ECI, climate change risk assessment methodologies, interconnections between and among other sectors and adaptation/resilience options for managing the impacts of climate change on ECI. Sources include journals, articles, reports and methodologies which have been published in the scientific literature during the period from 2001 to 2016; selected on the basis of their relevance to the aims of the paper.

Section snippets

Energy critical infrastructures at risk from climate change

To understand the risk that ECI face due to Climate Change (CC), it is important to review and understand the following:

  • the impacts that CC may cause to ECI (note that ECIs traditionally confront extreme flooding and wildfire events, which are the sequalae of increased climate change as well);

  • risk assessment methodologies used in the determination of CC risks and their associated impacts;

  • interconnections with other sectors, which may further magnify CC impacts; and

  • adaptation/resilience methods

Further results, analysis and discussion

According to Table 4 and Fig. 2, most of the papers (47%) reviewed identify the impacts of CC on ECI; 30% of them discuss adaptation and resilience measures and only 23% discuss interdependencies between other sectors. Only 2 papers have fully covered and combined all these three subjects together.

Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 a slight increase is observed in the interest in this subject of ECI protection from CC. Following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the interest in research on the impacts

Conclusion

The aims of this paper were to identify and discuss the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on energy CI as well as to present and analyse important aspects in CI protection such as, interdependencies with other sectors, and adaptation/resilience options through the related scientific work that has been published in this area.

The paper surveyed scientific articles and papers that are related to the risks of energy CI regarding climate change and extreme weather events.

Acknowledgements

This paper has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement n° 653824/EU-CIRCLE.

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