D2.3 Impacts on infrastructure, built environment, and transport

This document describes the impact assessment on infrastructure, built environment,and transport that has been conducted in order to inform the COACCH project. Theassessment uses state-of-the art models for coastal and river flooding as well as anew model for flood impacts to transport networks and computer impacts for Europeat higher spatial resolution(NUTS2) compared to previous studies. Future impacts (short-term to long-term) under varying socio-economic scenariosare computed for the RCP/SSP scenario combinations selected with stakeholders inWP1. In addition, coastal flood impacts are assessed for a high end scenario withglobal coastal average sea-level rise of 170cm until 2100, to illustrate the effects ofsuch a very improbable, but not impossible, high end sea-level rise. For adaptationtwo different strategies have been analysed: a follow current pratice strategy and ano adaptation strategy where no (further) adaptation measures are taken. Coastal floods can have most severe effects to infrastructure in the EU with expectedannual damages of €13 trillion (high end sea-level rise) respectively €4.5 trillion (RCP8.5), if no further adaptation measures are taken. However, investment intoadaptation can reduce these impacts drastically (two to three orders of magnitude),but adaptation to rising sea-level might cost between €15 billion and €40 billion everyyear in 2100. For river flooding, this deliverable introduces local-level river flood damage modelCLIMRISK-RIVER which is further integrated into CLIMRISK, a climate-economy IAM.The risk of river flooding in the EU is expected to rise from €9.5 billion in 2010 tobetween €70-80 billion in 2080 for most assessed RCP-SSP scenario combinations.However, an extreme outcome may arise for a future development aligned withRCP8.5-SSP5, for which projections show expected annual damage of €255 billion.The results show significant spatial inequalities of river flood risk, stressing theimportance of using local level river flood estimates in estimating the impacts ofclimate change for implementing timely local flood adaptation policies in the EU.The deliverable further introduces the newly developed line-based model OsdaMagefor assessing flood impacts to road infrastructure. By applying this model with riverfloods, we find that flood impacts to road infrastructure are in general 1-2% of thetotal flood damages. This shows that flood impacts to road infrastructure have beenoverestimated in previous studies.