Climate Change Impact Assessment on Ports

Abstract

In spite of the major and broad consequences of adverse climate change impacts on ports in general, relatively little and relevant detailed research is made available within public domain. Several studies have addressed climate impacts on transportation infrastructure however very few focus on ports and supply chain. Ports are considered critical infrastructure that serve as a catalyst for economic growth and development of a country. Their importance is not only on a national (or regional) level, but they act as gateways to trade and constitute essential nodes in the global supply chain.

The topic of this thesis on \textit{Climate Change Impact Assessment on Ports} is very broad to tackle within only 9 weeks (the length of this research). Therefore, the focus has been set on seaports within the Netherlands and more specifically, the Port of Rotterdam as main example. This thesis aims to advance research on climate change impact assessment on ports and supply chains. To achieve the aforementioned, a few research questions have been defined to help steer the research into the right direction: (1) What is known about the main impacts of climate change on ports and supply chains? (2) Which assets are vulnerable to the main impacts determined in sub-research question 1? (3) What are the state of the art strategies to perform a climate change impact assessment? And what are the available resources (frameworks, methods, software)? (4) Which knowledge gaps have been identified while answering sub-research questions 1,2 and 3? (5) How can one address the gaps identified in sub-research question 4?

The methodology of this thesis has two main parts: The literature study and the expert interviews. The interviews were a very important part of this research. That is because this thesis aims to present the needs from the users perspective, to motivate researchers to continue with the exploration of this topic. Formulating the right questions to ask the experts and identifying which of the 12 experts could provide the best answer to understand the needs from different port users perspective, was the most challenging part of this thesis.

The results of this thesis are research topics on the broad subject of climate change impact assessment on ports an supply chains. Due to time constrains, only 3 research topics are presented in more detail with the corresponding suggested approach. These three topics have been prioritized among the rest based on expert's opinions on what climate change issues are the most urgent (for further details see 2.4.2 \& 4.1-4.3).
These topics are: (1) Developing an Integrated Stochastic Model to Test Climate Change Resilience on Ports, (2) Investigating Methods to Identify \& Quantify Supply Chain Disruptions due to Climate Change Cascade effects
and (3) Developing a Method to Promote Awareness for Climate Change Resilient Ports. Nevertheless, chapter 6 presents a list of other potential research topics that can also be of interest to researchers. The recommendations for further research on the topic of climate change impact assessment on ports and supply chains are to follow the suggested research topics descriptions in chapter 6. Furthermore, to explore probabilistic models to tackle uncertainty issues and to understand the multivariate dependencies within ports and supply chains. Finally but most importantly, this research should be extended internationally, not only focusing on Dutch experts, to have a global perspective on the problems and the identified knowledge gaps posed on this thesis. Other recommendations can be found in chapter 7.