Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Knowledge, Uncertainties,
And Research Gaps
A. The Landscape Of Needs
Because the communities of expertise, decision-making, and policymaking about risk
management for infrastructures have traditionally been focused on single categories,
such as water or transportation, the existing knowledge base about cross-sectoral inter-
actions and interdependencies is limited, at least in research studies published in the
open literatures. As indicated above, recent simulation and analysis initiatives related to
national security concerns have provided powerful evidence that cross-sectoral analysis
is both possible and illuminating; but the research needs for the topic of this techni-
cal input paper are profound, if questions about climate change implications are to be
answered in the longer run. In fact, a high priority should be given to verifying and
validating the report's assessment findings, especially where the current evidence is not
strong.
General needs for mature knowledge, rooted in effective tools and available evidence,
include vulnerabilities of infrastructures and urban systems to weather phenomena as-
sociated with climate change; analyses of alternative actions: e.g., maintain and harden
as is; replace, revise, move; or invest in increasing flexibility - focused especially on
near-term choices (e.g., the next ten years).
More specifically, to assess climate change implications for infrastructures and urban
systems, knowledge and analytical capacities are needed for:
• Climate change projections, with a focus on:
• Uncertainty analysis of climate phenomena
• Analysis at regional scale
• Models of specific infrastructures
• Capturing sectoral infrastructure dynamics: e.g., lifetimes, depreciation rates
• Including issues of financing, management, and service delivery
• Models representing potential cross-sectoral effects of climate parameters, espe-
cially beyond historical experience, e.g.: issues for tool integration, interdepen-
dency consequence analysis, urban system analysis science - recognizing that
model interactions are likely to be iterative
• Models of the infrastructure impacts of (non-climate) economic/policy change
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