Climate change hotspots and the global telecommunications network

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 summarizing 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.