Abstract
Francis Zwiers: Climate risks to infrastructure are changing, and will continue to change
There is essentially no remaining doubt that rising greenhouse gas concentrations have warmed the global climate,
and there is now very strong evidence that this warming has led to more frequent high impact extreme weather and
climate extremes. These changes in both the mean climate and the frequency and intensity of extremes exacerbate
risks to infrastructure. I will discuss how such changing risks might affect infrastructure, using electrical
utilities as an example. Potential risks to such utilities include those that result from demand profile changes
that stress transmission infrastructure, extreme heat, more frequent and intense wildfires, extreme precipitation,
more frequent ice accretion events in some areas, and changing wind loads. This talk will give an overview of our
understanding of how and why climate has changed over the past century, how this has affected extremes and what is
projected for the future. It will also discuss some of the primary sources of uncertainty affecting the projections
and recent research using “emergent constraints” to reduce projection uncertainties. The talk will conclude by
discussing some approaches that can be used to deal with uncertainty when analyzing the potential impacts of
climate change to infrastructure and planning approaches for climate risk mitigation.
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