Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

High-density coastal cities are increasingly susceptible to the impact of climate change. Hong Kong being a densely populated coastal city was twice hit by super typhoons between 2017 and 2018. Although Hong Kong is famous for its well planned and designed infrastructure facilities, the super typhoons have exposed the vulnerability of the city’s infrastructure systems as the city was devastated by severe flooding, falling trees, disruption to the transportation networks, etc. While various government departments and utility companies have developed pragmatic resilience plans to minimize the disruptions brought by climate change to the social infrastructure facilities, they primarily focus on the adaptability and reliability of their own infrastructure system. Unfortunately, the interdependency of infrastructure facilities and the cascading effect caused by the multiple failure of systems have not been seriously considered when the resilience plans are formulated. This could substantially undermine the severity of impact brought by climate change to interdependent coastal infrastructure facilities. In this paper, an ensemble framework is proposed to assimilate the information from different owners and operators of infrastructure facilities. By integrating useful infrastructure design and condition data into the ensemble platform, high level analysis can be performed to uncover the hazard or disruption brought to the coastal infrastructure facilities and their potential knock on effects. This should help develop a forward looking and holistic resilience plan to reduce the impact of climate change to the community.