An East Coast Port Authority’s proactive approach to future-proof their assets against climate change.
The Challenge
Investing in resiliency has never been more important.
As extreme weather events become more frequent due to climate change, it is
imperative to understand the impact, risks and costs associated with them.
However, understanding how climate change-driven weather
events impact your ability to deliver service with your assets is difficult.
Uncertainty is high about what the climate
might be like in the future and how your assets will be impacted. This makes it
harder to assess what impact different mitigation projects might have on your
future risk exposure. There are various mitigation project options ranging from
relocating assets, building flood protection around assets, and building backup
systems through to provisioning equipment to shorten post-event recovery times
– but how much impact would each of these options have? And what would it cost?
For ports and coastal cities, the potential of rising
sea levels and more recurrent extreme weather events presents an even greater
threat to their communities and assets. The Port Authority of one major US city
sought a solution that could help them prepare for these future scenarios.
The Solution
Our Climate Resilience Analytics (CRA) solution
enables a port or coastal city to understand the impact of climate
change-driven events on their assets by enabling them to identify exactly how
to build greater resilience into their asset network, so their risks are
minimized and their community is protected. They can conduct a complete end-to-end assessment of risk exposure, through
mitigation optioneering, design and quantification, and then generate a
portfolio of mitigation projects which fit within the constraints of cost and
time. This solution has been developed in partnership with customers facing
these problems, so we were able to create a depth of understanding crucial to
building sound investment cases to protect against the future.
Our methodology allows for the assessment of
any complexity of the asset system, exploring weak points, single points of failure
and asset exposure to climate events. This is assessed across a range of future
climate change scenarios to enable the user to gain a deep understanding of the
risk exposure over time. Our solution then enables the user to undertake a ‘what
if’ analysis over their various facilities to explore the effectiveness of
various combinations of mitigations and simulate their effectiveness under
different weather event conditions. This allows them to build a business case
for further design for key options.
Finally, the quantified options are brought
together into a single portfolio to enable the user to develop an optimized
delivery plan for implementing protective measures. This plan will fit within
their cost and deliverability constraints to deliver the maximum feasible level
of protection. Our intuitive visuals and maps also make it easier for
them to plan and communicate effectively with their stakeholders, helping them
make a complex problem easy to understand and quantify.
The Results
Whilst the project is still in its pilot phase, CRA already helped our customer to identify key weak points in two of their facilities and forecast impact on facility operations up to 2100. Our solution allowed them to evaluate mitigation strategies in a what-if sandbox environment, as well as helped evaluate hazard impact on their entire asset network calculating criticality and risk, based on asset dependencies. Additionally, we enabled our client to optimize their investment plan.
Learn how CRA can help your organization.
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