Engineering news
A “radical new approach” to engineering design will be required if infrastructure is to withstand the rigours of climate change, experts at the IMechE have warned.
Dr Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the institution, highlighted the importance of a fresh approach in the wake of a collaborative report on adaptation to climate change produced by the engineering institutions.
Fox said engineers had to be prepared to incorporate forward-looking assessments of the potential risks posed by the climate as they moved to revamp existing systems and create new infrastructure.
He told PE: “We’ve got to take a new approach to design for future infrastructure in the coming decades. At the moment we design based on historical data, and we use periods of historical weather events to inform our decision-making about our designs.
“Clearly, what we’ve got to do in the future is use climate change projections to design. We’ve got to come to some sort of conclusion about the potential risks of projected climate change. Essentially it’s a probabilistic design methodology rather than one that looks backward.” Probabilistic design is already used in the nuclear industry to make safety cases for plant.
Climate change is expected to lead to an increase in extreme weather events such as very heavy rainstorms in Britain. It may also lead to hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters thanks to an increase in mean temperature, and an increased incidence of so-called “blocking highs” – where high pressure builds and sits over the UK – leading to colder weather in winter and sometimes a lack of wind, which has implications for renewable energy.
Engineers will have to retrofit existing infrastructure so it can cope with short-term extremes and long-term changes in the climate and design new infrastructure to deal with that too. There would inevitably be a trade-off, Fox said, between the desire to make infrastructure as robust as possible and the money available to protect it. The public might have to accept that certain key services would no longer be as reliable as they once were, he added.
“There is an issue in terms of the education of the public and acceptability of performance delivery levels. The engineering profession could deliver a 100% robust infrastructure to cope with climate changes, but it would almost certainly be cost-prohibitive to do so.
“At the moment the public is used to a particular level of performance as acceptable. In a changed climate with an increased incidence of more extreme weather events, we may need to accept a lower level of, say, availability of the rail infrastructure as a trade-off against significant increased costs.”
The IMechE had been successful in raising the issue of adaptation to climate change at the heart of government, Fox said. “As part of the Climate Change Act of 2008, there are adaptation clauses which mean that powers are set aside to ensure the UK is adequately adapted and resilient to climate change,” he added. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has responsibility for the national adaptation plan, which has to be renewed every five years.