Critical Infrastructures and Risk Assessment for Climate Change

Access to reliable information on technological systems and their vulnerability to weather and climate is crucial for the formulation of realistic climate action plans on critical infrastructures. However, when specialized technical expertise is required, the information necessary for their development among small communities is often not available.

In the case of a risk analysis conducted on water systems of coastal communities, it resulted that weather and climate were responsible for about two-third of all the system failures, and that the severity of the damages caused by weather and climate had dependencies in the interactions between water system services and stakeholders.

In order to make such knowledge available to stakeholders and useful for developing informed risk assessments, the risks measured in two sample coastal communities were expressed as use cases, which, in turn, were formalized into an ontology.

From this experience, we realized the need to evolve such a knowledge base to an innovative risk management system suitable not only for guiding users in searching information, but also for enabling sharing of knowledge on infrastructure components, weather, and climate.

It is anticipated that, once implemented, the system will be able to support semantic search of information relevant to the definition of risk parameters and also to suggest sources for related shared experiences. Furthermore, by leveraging artificial intelligence methods, the system will actively propose new sets of vulnerabilities for the stakeholders to investigate and validate.