Hydrometeorological resilience assessment of interconnected critical infrastructures

Undertaking systemic risk assessments of critical infrastructures (CIs) is necessary to improve understanding, mitigate impacts, and increase resilience to cascading effects of intensifying hydrometeorological hazards. This paper presents a novel quantitative approach with stakholder participation for simulating local physical interdependencies between multiple infrastructure sectors that may be disrupted by floods. The model comprised power, water, telecommunications, emergency, and transport systems. Local (node-edge) resilience metrics were computed to identify critical, vulnerable, and non-redundant CIs in the network. For infrastructures located in areas under risk of floods, global resilience metrics (for whole-network degradation) evaluated failure propagation. The approach was tested in a case study of Halmstad Municipality, Sweden, with a history of extreme hydrometeorological events. Results identified key power, water, and communication infrastructures with high disruption potential under flood exposure, as well as specific residential and industrial areas near hazard zones being the most vulnerable due to their extensive dependencies.