Resilience of large investments and critical infrastructures in Europe to climate change

The report aims to evaluate the current and future impacts of climate extremes on the current stock of critical infrastructures in Europe, and on regional investments under the Cohesion Policy for the period 2007-2013. The distribution of economic costs in space and amongst sectors provides an indication of the regions and sectors that may face substantial efforts for making present and planned critical infrastructures resilient to future climate. The following sectors have been considered: energy, transport, industry, social. Five fundamental scientific challenges have been identified, which have driven the strategic research activities:

1. Understanding how multiple climate extremes will evolve in Europe along the twenty-first century;
2. Developing a spatially coherent dataset of existing critical infrastructures;
3. Determining the sensitivity to climate hazards of critical infrastructures and EU-funded projects;
4. Assessing impacts at pan-European scale consistently and comparably across multiple sectors and climate-related hazards;
5. Appraising the cost of adaptation of infrastructures.