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efficiently implemented. Prioritization should consider the expected impact
that adaptations may have towards increasing the resilience of infrastructures,
resource availability, and time required for implementation.
• An improved understanding of the climate impacts on infrastructure and
subsequent changes in supply and demand of infrastructure services, as well as
resource constraints, will help provide a higher-level understanding of planning
strategies and policy options. As one step in this direction, a prototype resili-
ence assessment approach has been developed (Vugrin et al., 2010; Vugrin and
One study based on this approach analyzed the resilience of the national petrochemi-
cal sector to different hurricane scenarios (Vugrin et al., 2011). Researchers integrated
the resilience assessment framework with an agent-based model of the national petro-
chemical sector to analyze how sector adaptations to hurricane events mitigated impacts
and to identify less/more resilient supply chains. This analysis demonstrated that the
petrochemical sector was less resilient to a Hurricane Ike- scenario that makes land-
fall near Houston than a Hurricane Gustav-type scenario that makes landfall near New
Orleans. Not only was chemical production more severely compromised in the former
scenario, but the cost of adaptations (rerouting chemical shipments; finding materials
and supplies from new, more distant suppliers) were also three times larger. In anoth-
er study, researchers investigated the identification of optimal recovery strategies for
freight rail carriers in a hypothetical flooding scenario (Vugrin et al., 2010b). In this sce-
nario four key railroad bridges, located along the northern Mississippi River and which
are botlenecks in the rail network, are assumed to be washed out due to looding. The
study demonstrated that east-west freight rail traffic would be severely degraded in this
scenario when bridge repairs are being performed.
D. Assessment Findings
Regarding implications of climate change for infrastructures in the United States, we
find that:
• Extreme weather events associated with climate change will increase disruptions
of infrastructure services in some locations
See Section III A, III C 3, IV D
High consensus, moderate evidence
• A series of less extreme weather events associated with climate change, occur-
ring in rapid succession, or less extreme but severe weather events associated
with other disruptive events may be similarly disruptive
See Section III A, IV D
High consensus, moderate evidence
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