Modeling the adaptation of infrastructures to prevent the effects of climate change: An overview of existing literature

Climate change is likely to affect our infrastructures and, consequently, the way society interacts with these infrastructures. For instance, higher average temperatures increase the need for electricity delivered through the grid in the summer due to augmented air-conditioning. As the scientific consensus is that climate change effects may be severe, a next step is to divert the focus from the natural system to the effects on man-made systems. Particularly, we expect that the interconnectedness of man-made systems, especially energy, transport, ICT and water infrastructures is important with respect to cascading effects of climate change. In order to gain insight into the effects of climate change on our infrastructures and possible adaption strategies for the coming decades, we describe a literature search on the intersection of literature on infrastructures and climate change. Specifically, we search for ways to adapt our energy and transport infrastructures and make them resilient against the consequences of climate change and modeling approaches that simulate these adaption strategies for our infrastructure systems. We have found that, although there is a vast body of literature on climate change, less attention was paid to the effects of climate change on infrastructures. Our literature analysis shows that there is ample literature measuring the effects of climate change on individual technologies and parts of infrastructures. In contrast, the literature on the systems level, the adaptation of infrastructures and infrastructure interdependencies is just emerging. We anticipate that future research attention needs to be diverted from the analysis of a technical component (when will my bridge be broken) to the technical system level (how do I judge/measure when to replace a road section (including the bridge)?) or even to one of the socio-technical system level (how can I adapt the system as a whole as to prevent the effects of a tunnel breakdown?). We conjecture that suitable simulations and models should be developed to explore adaptation strategies at these levels of aggregation