Subsea cables are an essential part of a decarbonised future. Telecommunication cables reduce reliance on travel, enable remote working, education, financial trading, and telemedicine, while power cables transfer renewable energy from offshore. These networks are critical links, particularly to remote, developing countries, but also support >99% of global data transfer and international communications.

Despite our growing reliance on these networks, subsea cables and coastal landing stations are vulnerable to natural hazards, which can have major socioeconomic impacts (£100Ms to repair, larger costs due to lost financial trading, etc.).

Storm surges in 2012 knocked out Internet connections in New York, tropical cyclones offshore Taiwan in 2009 halted financial trading, while extreme river floodingtriggered offshore sediment flows ‘crippled’ internet connections across West Africa during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown. The risk to seafloor cable infrastructure is likely to intensify, diversify and impact new locations under future climate change scenarios, creating previously-unanticipated hazards. Subsea cables and their landing stations need to be resilient over their 30-year design life, however no study has assessed their resilience to the wide-reaching impacts of climate change on a global scale.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary international team, we will:

  1. determine how and where past climate change has affected cable resilience;
  2. transfer existing research tools and databases to map future hazard hotspots on the global network; with the ultimate aim of determining present and future resilience to inform when, where and which adaptation strategies are appropriate, and scope future collaborative research to fill outstanding knowledge gaps.

PI: Dr Mike Clare, National Oceanography Centre Southampton
Email: michael.clare at noc.ac.uk

Dates
–
Funding

NERC – Innovation Funding

Aim

We will provide urgently-needed evidence for decision-making to respond to climate change; mapping future marine and coastal hazard ‘hotspots’, identifying adaptation strategies, knowledge gaps, and research directions to ensure subsea telecom infrastructure is resilient to climate change impacts. This multi-disciplinary project is thus well aligned with COP26 ‘Action on Adaptation’ and NERC’s Resilient Environment priority.

We build on previous NERC-funded research; making use of global model projections of climate change effects on storms, waves and coastal inundation, and extending analysis of a global database of cable damage that assessed past impacts of individual hazards (identifying landing stations and shallow cables as highly vulnerable). International partners extend UK-capacity, particularly in compound hazards, modeling of storm surges, impacts and design of infrastructure.

The following outputs will shared with project partners and stakeholders and hosted on a project website:

  1. Catalogue spatio-temporal trends in past cable damage (as a heat map and timeline) to document first evidence of climate change-related impacts over the last 35–40 years (to be submitted as peer-reviewed paper).
  2. Climate Change Risk Register, summarizing hazards for cables (including emerging hazards), and their anticipated future frequency, magnitude, location and impacts under IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.
  3. Map future climate change ‘hotspots’ to assess future resilience; i.e. which cables, landing stations, regions, countries and cities are most vulnerable, when and where adaptation is required.
  4. White Paper summarising guidance for cable routing/design to adapt to climate change scenarios, and roadmap of research/collaborations required to fill remaining knowledge, data, and certainty gaps.