Risk and Decision-Making for Extreme Events: What Terrorism and Climate Change Have in Common

Abstract

Terrorism and climate change debates are often characterized by worst-case thinking, cost neglect, probability neglect, and avoidance of the notion of acceptable risk. This is not unexpected when dealing with extreme events. However, it can result in a frightened public, costly policy outcomes, and wasteful expenditures.

The presentation will describe how risk-based and cost-benefit approaches are well suited to infrastructure decision-making in these uncertain environments. Structural reliability, systems modelling and probabilistic methods are used to model infrastructure performance and resilience, risk reduction and effectiveness of climate adaptation or protective strategies, exposure, losses, and costs. The concepts will be illustrated with current research of risk-based assessment of climate adaptation engineering strategies including designing new houses in Australia subject to cyclones and extreme wind events. It will be shown that small improvements to house designs at a one-off cost of several thousand dollars per house can reduce damage risks by 80-90% and achieve billions of dollars of net benefit for community resilience - this helps offset the predicted adverse effects of climate change for a very modest cost.

Biography

Mark Stewart is a Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, and Director of the Centre for Built Infrastructure Resilience at the University of Technology Sydney. Prior to joining UTS in July 2022 Mark was Professor and Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at The University of Newcastle. He is an international leader in risk assessment, public policy decision making, and protective infrastructure for extreme hazards. He has applied risk assessment and probabilistic methods to a wide range of infrastructure/engineering systems, including terrorism and climate change. His ideas have been presented in four seminal books and many scientific and engineering papers, and has brought engineering and scientific expertise into the public policy domain.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Structural Safety, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.

Mark recently led a consortium of five universities in Australia for the $3.5 million CSIRO Flagship Cluster Fund project Climate Adaptation Engineering for Extreme Events (CAEx). The CAEx Cluster assessed the impact of climate change on damage and safety risks to infrastructure, and assessed the cost-effectiveness of engineering adaptation strategies. That work delivered world-class modelling of the performance and resilience of houses, industrial and commercial buildings, railways, and power distribution infrastructure subject to extreme wind, floods, and heat.