ADAPTANEED: adaptation needs in strategic infrastructures in Spain and research, development, and innovation opportunities

Extreme climatic events are likely to become more frequent owing to global warming. This may put additional stress on critical infrastructures with typically long-life spans. Therefore, there was a need to prepare infrastructure to the impacts of climate change. However, little was known about the risks of multiple climate extremes on critical infrastructures at national scale. Spain was not an exception.

The main objective of the project was to increase knowledge for the resilience of Spanish strategic infrastructures to the impacts of extreme climatic phenomena, based on replicable pilot cases.

Adapting critical infrastructure to climate change in and efficient way will require knowledge on both the cost of climate change impacts on infrastructures (e.g., energy and transport networks) and the benefits of adaptation options (including co-benefits of adaptation investment).

Drawing on recent studies, this project highlighted the adaptation deficit of the hydroelectric power and road networks across Spain, and the main challenges and options to minimize this deficit. To this end, Metroeconomica developed a methodology for costing the impacts of climate change on the road network and hydroelectric power, estimated the costs of climate change on the Spanish road network and hydroelectric power sector, identified cost-efficient measures to adapt roads and hydroelectric power sector to climate change.