Infrastructure failure cascades quintuple risk of storm and flood-induced service disruptions across the globe

Evelyn Mühlhofer*, David N. Bresch, Elco E. Koks

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Society is dependent on critical infrastructure that provides basic services such as healthcare, mobility, communications, and power. Severe weather can damage these vital infrastructure assets, disrupting services. Such disruptions can further escalate due to system interdependencies. Although research increasingly evaluates physical risks to infrastructure assets, knowledge on service disruption risks from natural hazard-induced failure cascades across networked infrastructure systems remains limited. Here, we couple an open-source risk model with a complex network-based infrastructure module to simulate spatially explicit service disruptions from 700 historic floods and tropical cyclones in 30 countries. We find that failure cascades account for 64–89% of service disruptions, which also spread beyond the hazard footprint in nearly 3 out of 4 events. Disruption-affected population surpasses estimates of physically affected by up to ten-fold. We demonstrate that knowledge of the effect of infrastructure network designs, population distribution, wealth, and hazard characteristics can help prioritize systemic adaptation strategies over asset-focused ones.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)714-729
Number of pages16
JournalOne Earth
Volume7
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Apr 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Authors

Keywords

  • basic service disruption
  • Critical infrastructure
  • failure cascades
  • floods
  • healthcare
  • natural hazards
  • open-source GIS modeling
  • power
  • risk assessment
  • tropical cyclones

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