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then, would entail not only the costs associated with the clean-up, repair and/or replace-
ment of affected infrastructure but also the economic loss of service as supply chains are
disrupted, business operations are suspended, or cascading economic effects occur.
The concept of redundancy is similarly related. The consequences of service loss can
be greatly ameliorated, and possibly even eliminated in some cases, if redundant ser-
vices exist. The road network in many urban areas is a good example. While the loss of a
critical, single road in a rural area may be catastrophic to travelers on it, loss of a similar
road would have far less consequence in urban areas which typically have more than
one way to get from an origin to a destination.
In practice, applying risk analysis to infrastructure services will require simplifying
assumptions and approaches as many of the relevant variables cannot be estimated at
this time, especially the probability distributions of future climates. They should, how-
ever, still be addressed conceptually to gain a more accurate and complete perspective
to assist infrastructure decision makers in addressing climate effects.
A strategic approach to the cost and timing of adaptation measures
As more climate impact assessments are being carried out on individual pieces of in-
frastructure, many analysts are failing to realize that adaptation measures to reduce the
impacts of climate change must be appropriate to the time frame of the anticipated im-
pacts. Failure to recognize this will lead to very high costs and unrealistic adaptation
decisions.
Near-term problems call for near-term solutions. Infrastructure that is currently vul-
nerable to storms, for example, may require immediate measures to address that vul-
nerability, which is magnified if the intensity or frequency is expected to increase. But
if there is no immediate urgency and future climate effects are perhaps many decades
away, pre-emptive high cost adaptation actions should be very carefully assessed before
being undertaken, for two reasons.
First, many infrastructure adaptation measures are very expensive. These can entail
changes to the operations and maintenance, materials, design, engineering, or location
of the structures. For major pieces of infrastructure, like a bridge, design, engineering
and location changes are counted in the millions to billions of dollars, and most infra-
structure managers will be appropriately cautious about undertaking major investments
without a clear and present need.
Second, our ability to project distant climate impacts is significantly reduced as re-
lected by the wide ranges for impacts. Infrastructure managers who might atempt to
take pre-emptive actions will quickly face the difficult task of determining more pre-
cisely what the future impacts will be. With uncertain future sea levels by the end of the
century, what design height should be employed for say, a bridge, recognizing that each
additional increment carries a substantial price tag? On the one hand, the manager is
faced with the potential of very high and possibly unnecessary costs, while on the other,
the probability of infrastructure failure in the future. This task is made even more crucial
by an economic outlook that is ever more financially constrained. These two factors have
important considerations for climate assessments.
The cost of adaptation has been of increasing interest in the assessment community.
Some have estimated costs applying the full burden to adaptation, and if this were true,
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