Advancing risk assessment of climate change and the resiliency of cities
Date
2023-07-20
Authors
Viseh, Hiva
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Abstract
Climate change is widely acknowledged to have significant impacts on socio-ecological systems, affecting different regions to varying extents through shocks and stresses related to extreme weather events, sea level rise, and other climate-related changes. This highlights the critical role of adaptation measures in reducing the imposed cost of climate change by increasing urban resilience under a variety of likely climate change-induced scenarios while capitalising on the opportunities presented by a changing climate. The initial step in comprehending the importance of investing in adaptation measures, and subsequently implementing effective strategies in urban areas, is to disseminate information regarding the risks posed by climate change and cultivate awareness and understanding of these risks. While the magnitude of climate change impacts and their resulting socioeconomic consequences still remain uncertain, the increasing complexity and interconnection of diverse social and environmental systems have dramatically impacted our ability to foresee future-imposed threats from climate change.
This PhD thesis aims to foster advances in risk perceptions of climate change by progressing risk assessment of potential hazards and changes imposed by climate change on urban areas, as well as by proposing new methods to assess the vulnerability and reliability of complex systems and networks that cities rely on under stresses and shocks, while using all available data and sources, and communicating the complex and multifaceted aspects of climate change in such a way that the data can be used practically in resilience planning and resource allocation. The proposed new methods are: using Euclidean distance in conjunction with the modified Mann-Kendall test to capture both the direction and magnitude of changes in climate data derived from a large number of models; using the Epps-Singleton test to compare climate change in neighbouring cities to see the degree to which it may be possible for adaptation plans to be similar; combining damage functions and probability bound analysis to estimate potential flood damage caused by different climate change-driven flood scenarios at a regional scale by measuring a fraction of the buildings while addressing often-missing uncertainty quantification in damage estimates; and estimating time to failure and repair time of complex systems and networks when dealing with uncertainty in input parameters as well as indeterminant functional dependency using imprecise probability analysis in a probability box approach. In addition, the introduced methods were used to assess the potential variations in diverse climate variables across Canadian cities; to estimate the impact of climate change on flood damage to residential buildings in Metro Vancouver, Canada; to quantify time to failure and repair time of power, water, and wastewater networks, and to calculate the time to failure that an average utility customer of a two-story office building may experience for different types of internal and external functional dependencies.
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Keywords
Climate change, Urban climate, Adaptation, Energy demand, Resilience, Vulnerability, Heat wave, Extreme heat, Precipitation, Uncertainty quantification, Probability bounds analysis, Flood risk, Probability box, Depth-damage function, Imprecise Probability, Infrastructure Dependency, Risk, Reliability, Time to Failure