A new approach to assessing port infrastructure resilience to climate risks and adaptive solutions prioritization

Abstract

Globalisation, cost and technological competitiveness, public climate awareness and quick sharing of information may justify strong tendencies for quick-fix “copy-and-paste” solutions for survival to climate challenges faced by ports. However, owing to the particularity, role, trade-off challenges, and uniqueness of each port, this approach is bound to fail.

A modern resilient port requires a unique forward-looking management approach to climate change based on port logistic resilience rather than just infrastructural resilience. Embedded in “divide and conquer” problem-solving strategy, the proposed methodology in this paper is a useful solution-focussed approach that serves to disintegrate climate change complexities into simplistic scenarios; thereby ensuring that each port contextualises its own climate problem and translate it into solvable entities. Adaptive solutions for low resilience score scenarios may then be assessed based on existing known methods (Costs benefit analysis, Multi-criteria analysis and Cost efficiency analysis, Source-Pathway-Receptor etc.).