Perspective: The Climate-Population-Infrastructure Modelling and Simulation Fertile Area for New Research

Abstract

Managing the risks posed by climate change and extreme weather to energy production and delivery is a challenge to communities worldwide. As climate conditions change, populations will shift, and demand will re-locate; and networked infrastructures will evolve to accommodate new load centres, and, hopefully, minimize vulnerability to natural disaster. Climate effects such as sea level rise, increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, force populations to move locations. Displaced population creates new demand for built infrastructure that in turn generates new economic activity that attracts new workers and associated households to the new locations. Infrastructures and their interdependencies will change in reaction to climate drivers as the networks expand into new population areas and as portions of the networks are abandoned as people leave. Thus, infrastructures will evolve to accommodate new load centres while some parts of the network are underused, and these changes will create emerging vulnerabilities. Forecasting the location of these vulnerabilities by combining climate predictions and agent based population movement models shows promise for defining these future population distributions and changes in coastal infrastructure configurations. By combining climate and weather data, engineering algorithms and social theory it has been only recently possible to examine electricity demand response to increased climactic temperatures, population relocation in response to extreme cyclonic events, consequent net population changes and new regional patterns in electricity demand. These emerging results suggest a research agenda of coupling these disparate modelling approaches to understand the implications of climate change for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure.