Climate change impacts on safety of levees: A Review
Climate change impacts on safety of levees: A Review
Levees are an important part of infrastructure, whose failure can have severe socio-economic consequences including loss of life. Levee failure can be due to various reasons including overtopping, erosion, structural, or geotechnical failures. Many of these failures can be associated with the magnitude and frequency of the occurrence of extreme flooding events. Given the wide-ranging factors affecting the safety of levees, a risk-based-approach accounting for various stability factors should be adapted. In most cases, risk-based analysis of the safety of levees, considers existing data on extreme weather events assuming stationary climatic conditions. However, it was proven that extreme weather events can become more frequent than usual because of climate change. The assumption of stationarity would no longer be valid. Hence, adaptation strategies for levee remediation must be designed based on realistically predicted future weather events considering the non-stationarity of climate. One can employ techniques such as downscaled general circulation models (GCMs) using static or dynamic downscaling, and considering time-varying exceedance probabilities of return levels in order to realistically model future weather patterns. These climate predictions, coupled with detailed hydro-mechanical analyses of levees, can be an effective way to design levee remediation strategies that are adaptive and resilient to future climate change.
J. K. Janga; Krishna R. Reddy; J. Schulenberg
18th European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ECSMGE2024)
C - Risk analysis and safety evaluation
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