Abstract
Urban infrastructures are essential to the health,
safety, security and economic well-being of citizens and
organisations. Therefore, the managers of critical
infrastructures (CI) and infrastructure systems in urban
areas need to be constantly aware of and prepared for to
any man-made and natural disasters. In this paper, we
propose a structured approach to assess extreme weather
impacts on CI and discuss how resilience and risk
tolerance of critical infrastructure can be enhanced. The
approach is aimed at supporting CI owners' and managers'
decision-making on a strategic level. It follows a
process flow from hazard and CI identification,
vulnerability analysis, potential damage estimation, loss
assessment to identification and assessment of measures.
The approach incorporates many elements, phases and
methods from hazard assessment, vulnerability assessment,
risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis (CBA), and
combines and incorporates them into one aggregated
structure, thus providing a holistic view to risk
management and CI protection. The proposed approach is
flexible in the sense that it encompasses not only a
rigorous quantitative assessment, but also allows for a
semi-quantitative or qualitative assessment. In addition,
the approach enhances transparency of decision making and
contributes to more comprehensive use of available
information. The paper is based on research carried out
in the INTACT and HARMONISE projects, which are co-funded
by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 171-180 |
Journal | International Journal of Safety and Security Engineering |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 2 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- cost-benefit analysis
- critical infrastructure
- extreme weather
- measure
- resilience
- risk
- risk assessment
- urban infrastructure
- urban resilience
- vulnerability