EU-CIRCLE

The main strategic objective of EU-CIRCLE is to move towards infrastructure network(s) that is resilient to today’s natural hazards and prepared for the future changing climate. Furthermore, modern infrastructures are inherently interconnected and interdependent systems; thus extreme events are liable to lead to ‘cascade failures’. EU-CIRCLE’s scope is to derive an innovative framework for supporting the interconnected European Infrastructure’s resilience to climate pressures, supported by an end-to-end modelling environment where new analyses can be added anywhere along the analysis workflow and multiple scientific disciplines can work together to understand interdependencies, validate results, and present findings in a unified manner providing an efficient “Best of Breeds” solution of integrating into a holistic resilience model existing modelling tools and data in a standardised fashion. It, will be open & accessible to all interested parties in the infrastructure resilience business and having a confirmed interest in creating customized and innovative solutions. It will be complemented with a web based portal. The design principles, offering transparency and greater flexibility, will allow potential users to introduce fully tailored solutions and infrastructure data, by defining and implementing customised impact assessment models, and use climate / weather data on demand.

The project made progress for the establishment of a contextual framework for assessing risk, analyzing consequences, strengthening resilience and adapting interconnected critical infrastructures to climate hazards and climate change. The continuous interaction and consultation with the project’s end users and stakeholders proved a pivotal step in elaborating their needs and guiding the envisaged output of the project. Their input was instrumental in elaborating a coherent risk and resilience framework that is capable to identify the climate risks to interconnected CI within a region, accounting for impacts directly to the CI (damages, performance levels, safety and reliability of assets, etc.) and also affecting society as a whole, the environment and the economic sectors for a region of interest. Complementary the main resilience elements have been identified, which are linked to service restoration and business continuity in the case of extreme events including also adaptation options preparing for future climate. A main outcome during RP1, is the translation of the theoretical framework into a dynamic simulation environment. The framework includes tools for processing climate data, development of input layers based on hazard models aiming to estimate likelihood and exposure of CIs to extreme events, assessing the impacts to the supply and demand of CI services and the induced damages.