Canada’s First National Engineering Vulnerability Assessment of Public Infrastructure

Organizational

General Information:

Author: Canadian Council of Professional Engineers

Year of publication: 2008

Available languages: English, Spanish, Portoguese, Vietnamese

Details of Assessment:

Type of assessment: Vulnerability assessment

Format of assessment: Report

Estimated costs for conducting: No information

Estimated duration of assessment: 15 months

To be carried out by whom: Others

Details: Professional engineers, government decision-makers

Institutional scale of use: National

Assesment to be used by which target audience: State level decision makers

Details: National decision makers

Output: Report

Methodological

Coverage & Methodology:

Region of origin: North America

Developed by which sector: Private sector

Applied in practice: Yes

Geographic coverage in analysis: North America

Potential geographic coverage: Canada

Sectors covered: Infrastructure

Details: Public infrastructure

Method used: Mixed method approach

Description of methodology: Scoping study, pilot study, six case studies, national workshop

Risk framework used: No explicit use of risk framework

Risk components incorporated: Vulnerability

Details: Differentiation of high vulnerability and moderate vulnerability

Hazards and impacts considered in the assessment: Extreme rainfall, Sea level rise, Storm surge, Flood, Extreme temperatures, Drought, Storm, Cold spell, Changing precipitation patterns

Source of required data: Primary and secondary

Details: Infrastructure data, climate data and climate change projections

Temporal scale: Current, Forward looking

Participatory elements: Yes

Details: National workshop

Consideration of interconnectedness and -dependencies of risks: No

Adressing uncertainty: No

Scope of assessment: Identification of risks, assessment of impacts, identification of adaptation options

Relevance for losses and damages:

Economic/Non-Economic losses incorporated: No information

Applicability for entire risk spectrum (from extreme weather events to slow onset processes): No information

Applicability

Recommendations for Adaptation measures included in Climate Risk Assessment: Yes

Details: Assess the need for changes to standard engineering practices to account for adaptation to climate change

Usefulness for political purposes: In the seven case studies and this report, a clear distinction is made between vulnerability and engineering vulnerability. In the broadest sense, vulnerability includes a wide range of factors that may affect the resiliency of a system, including engineering considerations; political decision-making; socio-economic factors; the risk tolerances of the affected populations and stakeholders and how this motivates political processes

Applied by whom: Canadian Council of Professional Engineers

Open access: Yes