Natural Hazards in a Changing Climate: Impacts, Adaptation and Risk Management

摘要

Global climate likely trends and the consequent global sea level rise, combined with potentially increased rates of extreme storms, necessitate the reconsideration of current planning, engineering and management practices of infrastructure. Recent storms, such as the 2012 Hurricane Sandy, resulted in inundation of coastal areas, flooding of tunnels and subway stations, power loss, shutdown of nuclear power plants, etc. Risks from such storms entail significant uncertainties. This paper examines trends of hazards with climate change considerations. Three hazard types are examined: wind speed, waves and sea level rise. The sea level rise is examined in detail for illustration purposes. The paper offers a preliminary, conceptual framework for quantifying SLR and extreme storm risks. The paper focuses on the Washington DC area as a case study; however the methodology can be used to examine other regions. The DC inventory used in this paper was based on open sources and is incomplete and/or inaccurate along the coastal lines. The increase in storm activity with wave run-up intensity escalation due to the rising sea level requires further investigation. The impacts of such increased activities at coastal lines would lead to interdependence with land-use and human-activity changes creating a need to examine SRL in socioeconomic system modeling.