Climate Change Risk Indicators (CCRI) for seaports in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Climate change is the most threating environmental issue and the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced. While acting as the key nodes of globalisation and international business, seaports are exposed to the vulnerability of climate impacts, mainly because of their locations, including low-lying areas, coastal zones, and deltas. The paper is to develop a Climate Change Risk Indicator (CCRI) framework for climate risk assessment of seaports, enabling research-informed policymaking on such a demanding topic. Due to the increasing number of extreme weather events (EWEs), climate change adaptation is becoming an essential and necessary issue to be addressed by seaport stakeholders. Climate risk analysis aids rational adaptation planning. Many climate assessments have been done for measuring climate vulnerabilities, and various climate adaptation measures have been proposed for reducing climate risks. However, few of them used quantitative approaches for climate risk evaluations in seaports and fewer on the provisions of CCRIs for comparing climate risks of different locations and timeframes to guide rational policy making. Furthermore, climate change is a dynamic issue, requiring big objective data to support the analysis (e.g. monthly climate data on CCRIs) of climate threats and vulnerabilities. In this paper, Evidence Reasoning (ER) is employed to evaluate the climate risks in seaports by tackling the incomplete data. The findings reveal the quantitative measures of climate change risks in different locations and in different months. Furthermore, the risk levels of seaports in the future are assessed for observing the changes and informing policy making. The main contributions of this study include the visualisation of the comprehensive climate risk levels and provision of a new climate risk analysis framework through the comparison of climate change risks with respect to different locations and timeframes. Suitable climate adaptation measures can be chosen to implement, and seaports can cooperate on climate resilience issues (e.g. seaport network service and pre-disaster relief logistics).