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Transnational dependencies of critical infrastructure during natural hazards

Are you interested in this MSc topic? Send an email with your CV to Kymo.Slager@deltares.nl or ingo.schoenwandt@dlr.de 

Participating institutes: Deltares, DLR, ...

Areas under investigation: all german-dutch JCAR ATRACE basins

Rationale and objective

Critical infrastructures (CI) are essential for the reliable functioning of societies by providing core services, such as mobility, energy, water, health care, security, among others, and thus maintaining their integrity through resilience management is crucial.

Natural hazards can block access to or break components of CI, impairing their services to citizens and thereby disrupt or even threaten the life of people. The extreme rainfall accompanying the storm "Anett" in September 2024 caused disruptions in large regions across the borders of Poland, Czechia, and Austria simultaneously. Natural hazards do not adhere to national borders.

In contrast, CI, protection measures and disaster response strategies are defined and organized nationally. Moreover, interdependencies between CI can potentially prompt transboundary cascading effects of CI where a disruption of CI spreads and causes failure of another CI in a neighboring country. Therefore, resilience management of CI faces the additional challenge of aligning transnational differences.

Approach

The knowledge gap of transboundary resilience management is characterized by several important questions:

  • -          Are there differences in the definitions of CI in neighboring European countries? 
  • -          How is the data availability about their location, specifications, condition and performance?
  • -          What are actual and potential dependencies between CI within a country and across borders?
  • -          What are relevant CI operators and other stakeholders?

This master thesis aims to tackle this problem under the joint supervision of Flood Risk Management - Deltares and the Institute for the Protection of Terrestrial Infrastructures of the German Aerospace Center (DLR-PI).

The goal is to identify and map the interdependencies of CI and highlighting potential transboundary connections and cascading effects in a Dutch-German border region.

Deliverables

Concerning the resilience management of CI in both countries, the contribution of this work is fourfold by i) evaluating definitions of CI, ii) analyzing the data availability, iii) identifying operators and other stakeholders, and iv) identifying dependencies between CI. The research is proposed to follow the resilience cycle as outlined by Mentges et al. (2023), leveraging expert interviews to elicit and network mapping techniques to visualize interdependencies, as well as geographic-information-systems (GIS) to present the final product. As part of the joint supervision, the student is expected to spend a share of the 6 months project at both institutions, Deltares in Delft (NL) and DLR-PI in Sankt Augustin (DE).

Requirements

  • Successfully completed courses on hydrology and/or hydrological modellling and/or water resources management
  • A reasonable acquaintance with Python or other script languages for programming