Playing Games to Understand Multiple Hazards and Risk from Climate Change on Interdependent Infrastructure.

Project Partners: Transport Scotland, Scottish Water, SGN, SEPA, Inverclyde Council, National Centre for Resilience, Climate Ready Clyde, Adaptation Scotland/SNIFFER

a) Our objective is to develop a game based approach to understand climate change impacts and adaptation on interdependent infrastructures. Using Inverclyde as a case-study, we will develop a transferable approach that identifies local scale interactions and interdependencies, and allows diverse infrastructure partners to jointly think of adaptation solutions.

b) Inverclyde is a local authority in the west of the Greater Glasgow region. The urban coastal strip forms a vulnerable corridor. Our project will bring together major infrastructure partners (Transport Scotland, Scottish Water, SGN), with regional partners (Clydeplan, Inverclyde Council), SEPA and national knowledge brokers (Adaptation Scotland, National Resilience Centre) in a 6 month project that focuses on using a game to develop a shared understanding of key multi-hazard risks to infrastructure in the region due to climate change.

c) Despite increasing capability to assess specific climate risks to infrastructure, our partners need to better understand vulnerability of infrastructure systems to climate-influenced environmental risks, and key interdependencies between them. Key challenges identified include: (1) translating climate projections into impacts on infrastructure - in particular with event succession, cumulative effects, long-term stresses, and/or multiple hazards; (2) identifying key location hotspots where there is a high multi-operator composite risk that may not be recognised by current practice; (3) understanding interdependencies between infrastructures operations, including varying resilience levels in regulation and license conditions; (4) considering impact of services provided by infrastructures and the socio-economic implications of service degradation or failure.

d) At the end of the project, our partners will have: (1) an improved understanding of why and when service interruptions may occur; (2) an improved understanding of the interactions between multiple infrastructure networks; (3) identified key hotspots where the greater risk may not be currently recognised; (4) identified key risks; and (5) access to a game approach for identifying key risks.

e) We plan a 6 month project employing one PDRA and contracting out design and development of the card game component.

The total cost of the project is £50,777.45 at 80% FEC (£62,596.81 at 100% FEC).

This project has been co-designed with our partners to develop an approach that enables cross-sectoral sharing of infrastructure risk within a context of climate change. It is intended to identify priorities based on existing information and expert knowledge - and to shape future collaborative work and identify knowledge gaps.

Outcome 1: partners have access state-of-the-art climate projections in a format that is familiar and accessible to a range of infrastructure stakeholders.
The 'decade of weather' dataset will be an extracted future weather series from the UKCP09 regional model simulations for the case study location. The project will add value by developing a methodology to identify 'risk events' in these datasets based on user-defined threshold criteria - identifying the benefits and limitations of using these projections. A tool developed by the project will enable our partners to further interrogate this dataset, and other datasets, based on thresholds relevant to their individual internal risk planning needs. Further, the easy accessibility of the 'decade of weather' playing card sequence will improve communication of climate projections to a wider range of people, within organisations and with stakeholders. The partners will also be able to replicate these approaches in any other location using the tools and methodology developed by the project.

Outcome 2: partners improve connections between organisations - and key individuals - enabling a shared understanding of cross-cutting climate risks and interdependencies.
The project will pilot a game-based scenario designed to facilitate cooperation, information sharing and elucidate expert knowledge - with climate projections embedded in the process. This is especially useful in a complex decision-making environment like that faced by our project partners - where climate resilience is improving in individual sectors, but there are a technical and capacity barriers to cross-sectoral information sharing. Our approach is flexible enough to work with available information (from research and infrastructure stakeholders) - and while it doesn't replace the need for detailed inter-operator risk modelling/assessment, it will help partners identify hazards that could impact multiple infrastructure, potential interdependencies, and to identify knowledge gaps and prioritise further research and actions.

The project will be applied to a priority area that have been identified by project partners (Inverclyde), but the approach will be readily adaptable to other locations as required.