Changing Weather Patterns, Uncertainty and Infrastructure Risks: Emerging Adaptation Requirements

As the climate changes, it is likely that risks for infrastructure failure will increase worldwide due to shifting weather patterns and extreme weather conditions becoming more variable and regionally more intense. Existing studies indicate that small increases in weather and climate extremes have the potential to bring large increases in damages to existing infrastructure. Almost all of today´s infrastructure has been designed using climatic design values calculated from historical climate data on the assumption that past extremes will represent future conditions. Changes in climate will require changes to these climatic design values, as well as larger societal changes. Uncertainties in the climate change models and in the projections on the magnitudes and directions of future changes limit abilities to design infrastructure for future conditions. Until these uncertainties in the climate change projections are reduced, it will become critically important that climatic design values be calculated as accurately as possible and that values are regularly updated to reflect the changing climate. Since uncertainty is accepted as a part of construction codes and standards, it should be possible to deal with the growing uncertainty of future climate design values through measures such as increasing safety factors, forensic analyses of extreme events and use of climate trends and climate model projections based on surrogate climate variables.