Reducing Infrastructure Climate Risk Through Technology Measures: Networked Utilities (IC80)

This paper identifies the key strategies or actions that networked utility infrastructure assets can take to decarbonise and build climate resilience. We give a high-level overview of influential approaches to achieve these aims that encompasses a wide range of infrastructure assets. Our “top-down” approach focuses on the general properties of assets in major infrastructure sectors and explores which strategies may be effective in multiple sectors.

We aim to find the most material strategies for both decarbonisation and physical resilience and gauge their effectivity.

Our literature review identifies the most material strategies, and their associated key technologies, across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and four climate-related physical risks - floods, extreme wind, extreme heat, and wildfires - and assess their effectiveness at reducing emissions or damage respectively. These four have proven to be the most common climate-related physical risks over the 20-year period from 2000-2019 (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2020). We show how these strategies are relevant to the networked utilities infrastructure class, how they might be different between different types of networked utilities assets, and how they can best be employed by asset owners, filling a critical knowledge gap in the industry.

This paper forms part of a series of analytical studies by the EDHEC Climate Institute (ECI) into the measures that can be taken to mitigate the risks that climate change imposes in infrastructure investments. It is intended to help asset owners, prospective investors and risk managers assess at a high level which strategies might enable them to protect investments into infrastructure assets against climate-related losses in the future.