Visualization of risk uncertainties in case of future climate risks - the case hydropower plant in Finland

Climate change imposes new risks with high uncertainty. There is a lack of practicable advice and methods how to manage these new emerging risks. Hence, the new risk assessment methods for identifying and assessing the risk are needed. It is challenging to describe the descriptive uncertainty (uncertainty of scenarios) and measurement uncertainty (uncertainty of harmful event) to decision makers who have to make investment decisions. In some cases changes can also be opportunities. This paper presents a procedure on how to analyse and prioritise future climate risks in practice. The use of procedure requires networking of natural scientists (hydrologists, biologists, meteorologists etc) and risk analysers; therefore the process should be directed and documented well. The main idea of the procedure is to use four fold tables to visualise the two uncertainties. With the help of this visualisation decision makers will be able to decide what kind of adaptation operations they should enforce. In this paper we focus on developing the visualisation of the risk identification and assessment process. In the study we intend to integrate the climate scenarios and technical risk assessment traditions in order to achieve a practical method for reporting climate change risk assessment in hydro power plants. The paper describes the development and the tools of the risk assessment process. Finnish hydropower company Kemijoki Ltd was used as a pilot case in our study. The study is a part of the Nordic Energy Research funded Climate and Energy Systems (CES) project.