Britain’s infrastructure is built for yesterday’s weather, leaving essential services exposed to cascading failures
Britain is preparing for yesterday’s weather while tomorrow’s climate has already arrived, engineers warn today.
A new report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the UK Infrastructure Operators Adaptation Forum warns that the biggest threat is no longer a single flood, heatwave or storm, but what happens when one failure triggers another.
Heatwaves, for example, can reduce power capacity just as demand for cooling soars. A power failure can then disrupt communications, digital services and healthcare.
The report, Preparing the UK for more Extreme Weather, calls for climate adaptation to become a national security priority, with responsibility for protecting critical infrastructure transferred to the Cabinet Office.
It also calls for infrastructure to be stress-tested against future climate extremes, rather than relying on historical weather, and for operators to report on their preparedness so Government can identify vulnerabilities before failures occur.
The report sets out five priorities for building a more resilient Britain: stress-test infrastructure against compound climate extremes, prepare for cascading failures across sectors, identify critical dependencies and single points of failure, invest in resilience before disaster strikes, and design infrastructure that can adapt as risks change.
The NHS is already using systems mapping to understand how climate risks could cascade through energy, telecommunications, data centres and healthcare. Meanwhile, the Thames Estuary 2100 plan uses monitoring and decision points to determine when additional flood protection is needed.
At Heathrow, complex climate projections are being translated into realistic scenarios to help operational teams understand risks and take action.
Dr Tim Fox CEng FIMechE, Chair of the IMechE Climate Change Adaptation Working Group, said:
“Britain needs to stop preparing for yesterday’s weather. The biggest risk we face may not be one extreme event, but several things going wrong at once and the failures that cascade from one system into another.
Our infrastructure is increasingly interconnected. If the power goes down, what happens to the water supply? If transport is disrupted, can essential workers get to hospitals? If a data centre fails during extreme heat, can vital healthcare services continue?
The report calls for greater investment in climate data, research and collaboration across the transport, energy, water, communications and healthcare sectors."
Extracted from IMechE website, read more here