Research Report Vital Infrastructure
20 January 2022
Master: River Delta Development
Colophon
Report Critical Infrastructures
Research Topic Vital Infrastructures
Version 1
Thursday, 20 January 2022
Rotterdam
Authors: Jesper Linderhof
lind0109@hz.nl
06-23030951
Ilse Ronner
ronn0001@hz.nl
06-36330437
U Mong Shing
shin0003@hz.nl
06-45568566
Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
Supervisor: Andreas Burzel
Martine van den Boomen 1
Summary
The impacts of climate change have increasingly negative effects on critical infrastructures. In the case of the city Rotterdam flooding is one of the most impactful impacts. The aim of this research is to gather an overview of the critical assets in Rotterdam of the critical infrastructures of energy, communications, drinking water, wastewater, flood defence, transport and health and the existing including their vulnerabilities, the adaptive measures that have already been taken and the existing knowledge gaps. The main research question of this project is: What knowledge exists in 2021 on the climate change related vulnerabilities and climate adaptive measures of critical infrastructures in Rotterdam?
The overview of the location of critical infrastructures has been made based on maps that were obtained through literature research or interviews and have been intersected with flood maps to determine the water heights at their locations. The vulnerability of critical infrastructures, including the critical water depths, has been determined through literature research and interviews. The measures asset-owners have taken has been determined through literature study and interviews. Lastly, the knowledge gaps have been determined by analysing the literature research and inter-view results with a framework of questions based on the learning stages by Abraham Maslow.
The location of most of the critical infrastructures have been found and intersected with flood maps. Most asset-owners are generally well aware of the direct impacts their critical infrastructures might suffer during a flood, and these are the impacts the infrastructures are most adapted to. This is not the case for the indirect impacts, which are not as well-known as the direct impacts and the critical infrastructures are often not adapted to. Some asset-owners already have taken measures to de-crease flood impacts. However, the probability of a large flood event is low which means that there is not much incentive for the asset-owners to implement climate adaptive measures. Most asset-owners do not have a knowledge gap with regards to their awareness to the impacts of flooding. However, in policies/strategies and risk analyses flood impacts are often not included. Further-more, it is not always known what other asset-owners do to prevent flood impacts or what should happen to prevent cascading effects.
The knowledge that exists about critical infrastructures, their flood vulnerability and current measures is mostly related to the direct impacts. From both literature research and conducting interviews it became clear that the direct impacts of floods on critical infrastructures are known. There have been several projects by both research institutions and asset-owners into the direct impacts of floods on critical infrastructures. Furthermore, most asset-owners have the ability to quickly recover from these direct effects and have a high level of redundancy built into their critical infrastructure network to decrease the damage of direct flood impacts. However, the indirect im-pacts and the cascading effects within a critical infrastructure itself are often not known. The inter-dependencies critical infrastructures have on other critical infrastructures are often known, but it in most cases asset-owners do not know what the other asset-owners do to prevent the vulnerability of their critical infrastructure to flood impacts. Furthermore, many of the asset-owners have calam-ity protocols or risk analyses that do not include flood impacts. In conclusion, the direct impacts of floods are well known, but there is a knowledge gap with regards to indirect effects of flooding, (internal) cascading effects and what flood impact prevention measures other asset-owners have taken. 2
Contents
1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
1.1 Background ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
1.2 Problem statement ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
1.3 Aim …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
1.4 Research questions ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 2
1.5 Reading Guide …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2
2 Method ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
2.1 Research Approach ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
2.2 Semi-Structured Interviews …………………………………………………………………………………. 4
2.3 GIS overview ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
2.4 Knowledge gaps ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
2.5 PQR overview ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 5
2.6 Quick-Scan Approach to Assess Criticality of CI in Feijenoord ………………………………… 6
3 Critical infrastructures Rotterdam……………………………………………………………………………. 8
3.1 Definition of critical infrastructures………………………………………………………………………… 8
3.2 Critical infrastructures Feijenoord …………………………………………………………………………. 8
4 Vulnerability of critical infrastructures …………………………………………………………………… 11
4.1 Vulnerabilities to precipitation and floods …………………………………………………………….. 11
4.2 Criticality of vital infrastructures ………………………………………………………………………….. 14
5 Current Measures ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 16
5.1 Critical Infrastructure Asset Owners ……………………………………………………………………. 16
5.2 Policy Level ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 16
6 Knowledge gaps ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 18
6.1 Flood impact prevention system …………………………………………………………………………. 18
6.2 Common knowledge gaps …………………………………………………………………………………. 19
6.3 Flood impact prevention asset owners ………………………………………………………………… 19
7 Discussion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 23
7.1 GIS Overview …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 23
7.2 Vulnerability of Critical Assets ……………………………………………………………………………. 24
7.3 Overview of Current Activities Asset owners ……………………………………………………….. 24
7.4 Knowledge Gaps ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 25
7.5 Quick Scan Method for Determining Criticality of Vital Infrastructures …………………….. 26
7.6 Interview-Based Information Gathering ……………………………………………………………….. 26
8 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 28 3
9 Recommendations ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 30
9.1 GIS overview ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 30
9.2 Vulnerability of critical assets …………………………………………………………………………….. 30
9.3 Overview of Current Activities by Asset owners and Governmental Institutions ……….. 31
9.4 Knowledge gaps ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 31
9.5 Quick Scan Method for Criticality ……………………………………………………………………….. 32
10 Advice for Role Municipality of Rotterdam …………………………………………………………….. 33
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 34
Appendices ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 42
Appendix A Research Area ………………………………………………………………………………………. 42
Appendix B Method ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 43
Appendix C Critical infrastructure definitions ……………………………………………………………….. 52
Appendix D Infrastructure vulnerabilities ……………………………………………………………………….. 53
Appendix E Maps of critical infrastructures …………………………………………………………………. 61
Appendix F Criticality of infrastructure ………………………………………………………………………… 76
Appendix G Policy-Level …………………………………………………………………………………………… 79 4
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
The July 2021 floods in the Rhine basin highlighted the vulnerability of urbanised delta areas to the consequences of climate change (BBC, 2021) (BBC, 2021) (Schmidt et al, 2021) (NOS, 2021), and the need to protect critical infrastructure assets. Climate change increases fluctuations in river peak discharge and annual precipitations (with more extreme precipitations events) and the num-ber of heat waves. This also has an impact on the liveability of Rotterdam if the city does not undertake measures to adapt (Rotterdams Weerwoord, 2019).
One area in Rotterdam, the Feijenoord district (see Appendix A for the project boundaries), is a location where critical (infrastructure) assets are under threat of climate change. Part of this area lies outside the dikes, with inner dikes being low in other parts. This leads to an elevated probability of flooding in high-water events from the river or because of extreme precipitation, which can affect the functioning of these critical infrastructures (CI). The municipality of Rotterdam has as mission to create a climate resilient Rotterdam, and to achieve this, the knowledge gaps for the vulnerabil-ities of CI must be identified.
1.2 Problem statement
The impacts of climate change are becoming more frequent and threaten the functioning of several CIs in the municipality of Rotterdam, flooding in particular. It is currently unknown how vulnerable these CIs (energy, ICT/telecommunication, drinking- and wastewater, (public)transportation and healthcare) are to climate change, and what protocols and measures CI asset owners have taken to reduce these vulnerabilities. There is an added complication that the municipality does not own all these assets, which makes it difficult to get insight into where critical knowledge gaps are in relation to the climate resiliency of CIs.
1.3 Aim
The aim of this research is to identify the knowledge gaps on the effects of climate change on CI assets in the municipality of Rotterdam, with a focus on mapping the vulnerability for CIs in the Feijenoord district. During this research an overview will be made that shows the climate-related flooding vulnerability of assets in Rotterdam, the actions asset owners have taken to combat cli-mate change related vulnerabilities, what is happening in Dutch policy (on different levels) and the knowledge gaps that currently exist related to CIs. This research will be conducted with a focus on the critical infrastructures mentioned below:
- • Energy (electricity/gas)
- • Communications
- • (Drinking) water
- • Transport
- • Health
The result of this research will be an overview of the CIs in Rotterdam, which asset owners are responsible for these, what the vulnerabilities of these CIs are, and what is being done to combat vulnerabilities. In addition, an advice will be given on what role the municipality of Rotterdam could take in filling these knowledge gaps and organising this process. 2
1.4 Research questions
The main research question is as follows: what knowledge exists in 2021 on the climate change related vulnerabilities and climate adaptive measures of critical infrastructures in Rotterdam? With sub-research questions being:
1 What are the current critical infrastructures in the city of Rotterdam that are vulnerable to climate change?
2 What information is currently available on the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures with regards to climate change?
3 What have asset owners already done to decrease the vulnerability of their asset to climate change?
4 How can the municipality of Rotterdam deal with current knowledge gaps with regards to climate change related vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures?
Besides this advisory report, any created GIS maps about the current critical infrastructure in the selected research area will be included as a GIS-map/geopackage for the municipality, in addition to the PQR/knowledge gap overview.
1.5 Reading Guide
This report is structured as follows: Chapter 2 describes the research approach and methodology. Chapter 3 goes into the critical infrastructures that can be found in Rotterdam, and Chapter 4 into the vulnerability of these critical infrastructures. Chapter 5 then discusses the current measures that have been taken or are being planned by CI asset owners and on policy level. Chapter 6 discusses the identified knowledge gaps, after which the discussion of all the research can be found in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 covers the conclusion, and the recommendations are detailed in Chapter 9. Finally, Chapter 10 provides an advice for the role of the municipality in determining and filling the knowledge gaps. 3
2 Method
2.1 Research Approach
Figure 1 visualises the research approach. It consists of four phases, with data validation woven throughout the research. The preliminary research phase speaks for itself. In data collection, two main lines of activities can be found: semi-structured interviews with accompanying data pro-cessing steps of note-wise transcribing (and full word for word transcription for an interview with the province Zuid-Holland) and coding, and literature research for the questions defined in the proposal. As part of the phase data interpretation, interpretative summaries for the interviews with the CI asset owners were made which were also emailed to the interviewees for validation. Liter-ature research, emailing the interpretative summaries to the interviewees, and the final presenta-tion are important steps in the validation phase.
Finally, for data interpretation, there were seven activities, the first (the creation of interpretative summaries based on the interview transcripts and the initial coding round) serving as partial input for the other activities, which were: reviewing the current measures taken by CI asset owners and in Dutch policy, making a PQR overview for each CI asset owner, the identification of knowledge gaps based on the method described in Chapter 2.4, a GIS-based vulnerability overview of the investigated CI, an analysis of the cascading effects between CIs, and “CI criticality in Feijenoord”, which entails a quick-scan approach to determine the criticality of the CI’s in the Feijenoord re-search area looking at direct and indirect vitality as described in Chapter 2.6.
Figure 1: Research approach 4
2.2 Semi-Structured Interviews
Part of the information on what critical infrastructure asset owners are doing to reduce the vulner-ability to climate change of their assets can be found online, such as the municipal sewer plan of the municipality of Rotterdam. The other part cannot be found in publicly available sources, which is why semi-structured interviews were chosen to try and cover this gap. After an initial quick scan of which type of critical infrastructures are present in the research area, and which asset owners are tied to those, invitations for interviews were send. For all asset owners, a general interview guide was used, with the flexibility to go more in depth in for the research relevant topics, depend-ing on whom the students talked to and what their expertise was regarding the asset management of the critical infrastructure of that organisation. The full interview guide can be found in Appendix B.II, together with the organisations approached and the organisations interviewed/from whom the students got a response.
2.3 GIS overview
To determine the vulnerability of ever asset in GIS, the flood hazard ad the exposure have been analysed. A detailed overview of the used method can be found in (Appendix B.III). To determine the flood hazard to critical infrastructures, the location data of critical infrastructures is needed first. This location data has been collected through online sources if possible or was obtained through interviews. Next, water depth information was needed for both river floods as precipitation floods. This information was obtained through LIWO, where river floods with return periods of once every 10/100/1.000/10.000 and 100.000 years and precipitation floods with return periods of once every 10/100/1.000 years were obtained.
The exposure of the critical infrastructures has been accomplished by intersecting the location data of the critical infrastructures with the water depth data at that location. This intersection was calcu-lated in the program QGIS with the ‘grid statistics for point’ and ‘spatial statistics’ tools. The result of this calculation is either a points or polygon shapefile with several water depths added in their attribute table, for several flood events. These water depths in the attribute table were used to assess which asset has a large probability of flood damage.
2.4 Knowledge gaps
The knowledge gaps were determined based on the information that was gathered during the lit-erature research and interviews. To determine the knowledge gaps, a framework of questions has been made (Figure 2). A more detailed explanation of how the framework was made can be found in (Appendix B.IV). To determine the knowledge gaps, the information from the interviews and the literature research were collected for every asset owner. Based on this information, the ques-tions were answered. If a question cannot be answered, there is a knowledge gap. However, there can be more nuance to a knowledge gap. This nuance is provided in the description of knowledge gaps in the chapter about Knowledge gaps. 5
.
Figure 2: Framework of questions used to determine the current awareness & knowledge of asset owners
2.5 PQR overview
To structure the knowledge gaps, the PQR method from the soft systems methodology (SSM) was used. The SSM can help in dealing with complex, so-called wicked problems, where many view-points and perspectives of different people/organisations involved. The PQR method is one of the tools that can help in structuring such a complex system by looking at the what, the why and the how of both the system and every individual/organisation. The knowledge gaps themselves are not the core of the PQR in itself but do provide context to the inner workings of the organisation within the system of flood prevention and flood mitigation (Checkland, 2000).
The PQR shows the inner processes in an organisation based on interviews with regards to the system of flood (impact) prevention, as can be seen in the example in Figure 3. Here the telecom-munication organisations KPN and Vodafone-Ziggo are discussed. The (what) of telecommunica-tions is that they will provide calamity teams and citizens with telecommunication options, and the (why) is because they want to decrease telecommunication outages during floods. An example of (how) they will do so, is by using mobile telephone masts during the flood for example.
The (what) of the organisation is one of the (how’s) of the entire system. The (what) of the entire system is to prevent failure of critical infrastructures, and the (what) of the organisations show (how) this prevention happens in the entire system.
The knowledge gaps based on the questions in Figure 2 are shown on the right side of the PQR, of every organisation. These gaps provide insight in the position of the organisation with regards to the entire flood impact prevention system. For example, there is currently no information avail-able on what measures are effective, nor is there a focussed strategy on preventing flood impacts. For the flood impact prevention system, this means that primarily the small-scale assets in neigh-bourhoods have a large probability of failure during a flood, as only the larger telecommunication centres have adaptation measures in place.
The interconnectedness of the system and the organisations is furthermore shown by the condi-tions: a certain condition has to be met before an activity can start. There are two types of condi-tions shown at every organisation: the conditions related to the function of the organisation and the conditions the organisation creates that influence other organisations. One example of a con-dition related to the function of the telecommunications sector from Figure 3 is the condition fi-nancing of the climate adaptive measures to prevent the failure of critical infrastructures. The ques-tion now becomes: who will finance the measures, and which organisation(s) has the authority to determine this? 6
Figure 3: Example overview PQR and knowledge gaps
The result from this method will be a PQR overview, that shows a PQR for every critical infrastruc-ture sector (energy, communications, (drinking) water, transport and health) and their relation to the entire system, their role in the prevention of failure of critical infrastructures, what conditions they need from the system to keep functioning and the awareness/knowledge they are currently lacking.
2.6 Quick-Scan Approach to Assess Criticality of CI in Feijenoord
| During flood, first order impacts i.e. loss of essential services causes social disruptions in the so-ciety. The basic step in quick scan is to Identify and analyse critical infrastructure assets and rank their criticality (C. Zevenbergen, 2018). To carry out this step criticality was expressed by the extent of the area affected by flood (Manuela Escarameia, 2013). In order to map the criticality of vital/crit-ical assets, first order consequences (immediate effects) of flooding were considered. All vital/crit-ical assets were placed in a figure with on one axis the relative value of their direct vitality and on the other axis the relative value of their indirect vitality. Indirect vitality as the amount in which other vital products and services contribute to the dependability of the vital service or product. Direct vitality as the contribution that a product or service delivers to the continuity of the society. All critical assets are scored based on the aspect of the extent of the area covered. Based on question of affected area, critical assets scored in both direct and indirect vitality from the answers in interviews. The scale is from street level to national level with scores from 1 to 6. Area extent | Score on criticality |
| Street level | 1 |
| Neighbourhood level | 2 |
| District level | 3 |
| City level | 4 |
| Provincial level | 5 |
| National level | 6 |