Framing Climate Change Implications for Infrastructures and Urban Systems - Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities - page 30

Figure 10 Interdependencies between energy and other sectors
frequently consist of airports, ports, heavy rail terminals and subways systems and are
already under significant stress from aging infrastructure, congestion, and economic
and environmental pressures. Congestion, not only on major roadways, but also on
transit, at airports and at major ports of call, is common in urban locations, and demand
for passenger and freight services continue to grow. “Just-in-time” delivery mechanisms
make the reliability of the transportation infrastructure and operations critically time
sensitive.
Energy
In recent years, a number of sessions at the annual Energy Modeling Forum in Snowmass,
CO, have discussed cross-sectoral relationships between the energy sector and other in-
frastructures, including urban systems. For every sector of interest in climate change
vulnerability, impact, and adaptation analysis, energy infrastructures and services are
strongly linked in both directions: as a source of cross-sectoral impacts and as a subject of
cross-sectoral impacts. Figure 10 illustrates these linkages with examples. For instance,
take water: water infrastructures need energy for pumping, and energy infrastructures
need water for hydropower and thermal power plant cooling; take transportation: ve-
hicles need energy for motive power, and energy infrastructures need transportation to
supply coal, oil, gas, and other essential supplies; take telecommunications: communica-
tion technologies need electricity to operate, and energy infrastructures need communi-
cation infrastructures to manage what they do (and that dependence is increasing: e.g.,
the Smart Grid concept). Hints of the importance of energy for other infrastructures can
be seen in the level of investment in electric power backup systems, from batery storage