By Tom Burgoyne, Anglian Water and Elliot Cristou, Connected Places Catapult
A Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) is helping shape the water industry’s understanding of the impact of extreme weather on our infrastructure.
Tom Burgoyne, Asset Systems Specialist at Anglian Water, and Elliot Christou, CReDo Lead at Connected Places Catapult, explain all.
The frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as flooding and heatwaves, are rising, and this presents challenges for how national infrastructure works and is managed.
The annual State of the Climate Report found that last year was the second warmest year on record, behind 2022. Not only that, 2023 was the seventh wettest year on record for the UK, with September to DECEMBER 2024 being named as the wettest period since 2000.
All of these climate change events present far reaching consequences for national infrastructure, especially if providers are not prepared. This has knock-on effects for customers, who may lose communication or power, impacting the services customers receive.
As such, it is key for asset owners to increase their understanding of infrastructure dependencies and the future of climatic impacts on assets. However, this challenge is not well understood.
One of the reasons behind this is due to the lack of granular and historical data which is needed to better forecast the potential impact of extreme weather events.
As well as this, infrastructure systems, such as telecommunications and transport are highly interconnected, which makes it difficult to predict how an extreme weather event could affect each system individually and the impact on the broader network.
So, how can asset owners ensure infrastructure resilience in the face of extreme weather events?
Putting data at the heart with the right technology
Data plays a prominent role when it comes to asset and infrastructure management.
Within this, semantic interoperability is important to ensure that all parties have a clear understanding of what the data shows. To do this, the data should be appropriately standardised, with assets being defined in a much more consistent way across all sectors.
This will ensure that all parties better understand the dependencies between different infrastructures. As well as this, the data should be free of siloes, to ensure greater visibility and transparency of what infrastructure is affected, how and when.
Going further, this data can be fed into the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) connected digital twin platform. By leveraging a sophisticated climate modelling and simulation, it enables much better decision making for infrastructure resilience in the face of an extreme weather event. Through a digital twin model, data can be visualised, and asset failure models can be used to understand how infrastructure systems are impacted how quickly and over what sort of time period.
The combination of a connected digital twin platform with the right data can be used to predict how future infrastructure and assets could be impacted by extreme weather events.
This can make sure that investments are being made in the right areas to protect assets and ensure continued operation. This will also inform what interventions and innovations should be made to increase system resilience for a wide range of extreme weather and catastrophic events.
At the same time, ensuring the safe and secure sharing of data between parties is crucial. To achieve this, data should be decentralised on a distributed architecture and only shared on a need-to-know basis. This not only ensures that the data remains confidential, but also enhances security.
The future impact of climate change
Looking further into the future, the UK Climate Change Projections (UKCP18) forecasts that not only will summers become hotter and drier, but winters will become warmer and wetter.
As climate change is only expected to become more impactful, it is critical to extend this digital twin model to other asset owners, new sectors, wider geographical regions, in addition to including a range of extreme weather events. This is essential to ensure a much better understanding of the interaction between assets, sectors, and weather events.
In combination with climate data and predictions of asset failure data derived from digital twin models, it will enable asset providers to understand how climate change can impact assets. This will give infrastructure planners a more robust understanding of the risk and how they can mitigate asset failures in the future.
Climate-led impact on infrastructure is only set to become more of an obstacle that asset providers will need to overcome going forward, especially if climate change continues on the trend it is expected to.
As critical national infrastructure providers of all types continue to grapple with changing climate risks, data and digital twins must be leveraged to properly understand and mitigate co-dependencies, so that the services people rely on for their health, wellbeing and work continue to be delivered.
