Towards a holistic prioritization of climate-change risks for bridges

Abstract

Although the projected changes in the climate include considerable uncertainties, especially with downscaling, there is irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing at an unprecedented and alarming rate. In recent studies, some of the potential climate-change risks on bridges have been identified. The sheer number of these potential risks provokes two questions. Firstly, for a certain risk of interest (e.g. increased scour rate) which bridges should be prioritized from an inventory of bridges? Secondly, for a specific bridge, which of these risks are more critical? This paper proposes a method that can be used for addressing these two questions while considering the uncertainties intrinsic to the problem. Although this paper focuses on addressing the first question, a discussion on how the proposed method can be used for answering the second is also presented. The suggested method is based on four risk components

namely: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and consequences. In spite of being specifically tailored for bridges, the developed method can be easily extended to other types of infrastructure. The proposed method is a step towards an improved climate-change risk management.