At the Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres,praised the shipping industry's responseto the race against the climate crisis. Best described as "cautious yet upbeat message", he believes it was a "huge step up".

While there was a call to “ramp up actions and ambition”, change does not happen overnight. Ahead ofGlobal Dredging Forum, we were considering the impact of climate change on ports. How vulnerable are ports to future climate change?

我们与Greg Fisk，环境伙伴关系主任讲话BMT(a global marine science and technology consultancy firm) to better understanding the vulnerability of the port to future climate change.

With over 20 years of experience in climate change planning and adaptation studies across both public and private sector organisations, we asked Mr. Fisk about the challenges to ports and the maritime industry, risk and vulnerability assessments, and the balance between adaption and mitigation with regards to climate change impacts.

Knect365 Maritime: In your experience, how have attitudes towards Climate Variability and Climate Change changed in the last 10 years?

Greg Fisk：It depends on where you are in the world, but I think concern about climate related change and extreme weather events has been gaining momentum.

I think there was then a period where the concern was hijacked by a notion that the greater implications of adaptation were worse than climate change itself. We saw politicians around the world saying that it is not an issue, it's just natural variability and we should just should not worry about it.

But it has really changed again, in the last two-to-three years, where there has been a spate of extreme weather events. It’s also all-over mainstream news and we are seeing so much more activism around the issue, including individual and political action, and from societies and movements all over the world.

The policy landscape is also complex - with the setting of emission targets and carbon reduction under the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC) - but it’s important to remember that within the climate space there are two fields of practice.

One aspect of the field is seeking to understand, and reduce, the carbon emissions around the world to prevent further warming (colloquially this is called climate change mitigation). Whereas the other aspect of the field is around accepting there will be increasing impacts and working to build resilience and adapt to these changes. BMT as a multidisciplinary, international management consultancy is embedded in this resilience and adaptation field, helping our clients to understand and adapt to what are increasingly looking like inevitable climate risks.

Knect365 Maritime:What are the challenges to ports and the maritime industry?

Greg Fisk：Seaports are in the crosshairs of most of your coastal climate change impacts.

当您谈论气候变化的沿海维度时，您正在谈论飓风和飓风，风暴潮汐，侵蚀，高风等极端天气活动，并且通常在更强烈的风暴中。

Ports are at the forefront of that coastal effect as they are both exposed and sensitive by virtue of their location, and they have an operability mandate – meaning that they need to operate for people to import and export goods. They can’t afford to have much (if any) downtime, and they are reliant on the logistics chain getting to the port (roads, rail, etc.) in order to distribute goods.

But where to start? The first step in looking at the issue is some form of assessment from a vulnerability perspective, moving towards what resilience actions can they take and what sort of adaptation measures are allowed.

For example, here there are three things to look at.

首先，港口可以通过设计措施和装饰来保护港口对其资产的物理损坏。

Secondly, they can look to protect workforces. As ports generally have 24-hour operations, there may be times when the workforce cannot do their jobs (for instance because of extreme heat), and this can influence the safety and productivity of workers.

需要看待的最终事项是特定情况下的可操作性。例如，如果有高风，您可能无法在端口上操作龙门起重机。同样，如果您的码头水平受到更高水平的影响，您可能难以加载和卸载船舶。

These are some practical issues that ports are going to have to have to deal with, and I think the challenge at the moment is that it only a small number of ports around the world are on the front foot of understanding their vulnerability.

That’s not to say that there are not lots of people thinking about it, but there are probably only a small number of ports that have done a really thorough assessment and - taken that next step, and started to look at an adaptation strategy, that covers the effects of climate change on their operations.

Knect365 Maritime：对海港的风险和脆弱性评估有何影响是什么意义？

Greg Fisk: There are probably two overarching factors in the context of the work we do with ports, and other entities, with regards climate risk related studies.

第一个是了解漏洞。我们倡导第一个，第二和第三次传球方法。

第一次通行证是一种高级和定性。我们研究气候如何在局域在温度，水分，海平面上升和风雨中变化。

第二次通过评估了解这些因素如何影响资产，运营和劳动力。该通过更详细地审查了当前情况，并且是定性和半定量分析的混合，并且通常涉及ISO-31000风险评估。

在第二次通过中，您需要深入了解空间范围和风险的时机。您将在每年的风暴数量，风暴潮，洪水和侵蚀的程度上进行目前的风险概况。部分研究还通过方案表演预测，可能会随着风暴而增加，海平面上升等等。

With that, you start to map those hazard areas over the relevant areas of the coast where the port is situated.

This more site based assessment is important as it gives you an idea of the risks to existing infrastructure as well as being able to estimate or at least postulate changes to the business such as how much additional maintenance dredging you would have to do because more storms will bring more material into your channels and it will need to be cleared.

因此，在这第二次通过中，您正在建立一个更大更好的图片 - 都在空间和时间上 - 释放您的风险概况。

The third pass assessment is around more detailed numerical modelling your risk profile. BMT has a suite of numerical modelling software and approaches that we use to help clients to build a risk model of their port. With the models we can look at different scenarios and simulations to examine the probability of specific things happening and more importantly, the consequences.

To assess the consequences of climate risk, we work closely with the asset managers, planners and engineers at the port. We look to understand, if a particular climate event or effect happens, what would be the impact on infrastructure and operations. On most occasions, the science can only take you so far, but you must get those specialists in to help understand the implications on the assets and on the business as a whole.

These studies tend to be done while working in close partnership with the client.

在一项研究中，一个组织将开始觉得他们对会影响它们的东西有更好的抓地力，什么都不会影响它们，以及他们将要做什么。

诀窍课程是所有这些弹性和适应措施的成本时间和金钱，你无法立即锻炼一切，所以你需要有一些触发器，因为你打算做事。

Knect365 Maritime:Is the solution to the effect of Climate Change on ports not simply to build seawalls, create elevation, or port relocation?

Greg Fisk：As port assets generally have been in place for a long time and have national economic importance, I think one would always look at engineered solutions to defend existing infrastructure rather than pick-up and move ports.

然而，如果港口正在扩展或设计新的基础设施，气候风险肯定会考虑到。

在这种情况下，组织面临的挑战之一是他们将坚持的工程设计标准。说一个港口有一个Levee Bund来防止洪水，我们知道Levee Bund不会足够高，我们将开始看到2060年的更加泛价。这个问题是，我们应该设计什么标准？它应该是500年的活动吗？一个在1 000年的活动中？

There aren’t recognised international standards for climate change out there as yet so in many cases this comes back to risk tolerance and best practice engineering advice.

第二个问题是，虽然我们可以做大量的模拟，但我们可以得到一个非常好的想法，当会发生影响时，仍然非常难以筹集资金。在一个完美的世界中，您将寻求设计所有基础设施，以便在接下来的100年内成为气候证据，但它不太可能港口可以获得或产生资金来做到这一点，因此它们必须将此视为随着时间的推移触发的增量方法。

By the same token they don’t want to have a situation where the only time they do anything is following a disaster. The costs of remediation and reinstatement of infrastructure (as well as downtime of operations) can be crippling and financial support from Governments and insurance brokers is likely to wane as more and more extreme weather events are experienced.

So, acknowledging these issues around funding, timing, and what standards are available, I think the solution for many organisations will be in engineering and protection - but there is still some complexity to it.

Knect365 Maritime: With a diverse set of socio-economic factors, implementing change at the seaport level must be difficult. Is there a balance between adaption and mitigation that needs to be struck?

Greg Fisk：There is, and an organization, ideally, needs to be looking at both.

我认为气候变化适应是一个糟糕的堂兄，气候变化在过去的15 - 20年里，但是开始改变，现在有一些广泛的司机来了解风险和适应。

Within the private sector, there is theTask Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures。

在金融部门发布的指导方针中，TCFD鼓励公司透露其作为财务报表的一部分的气候风险。

With many public and private shareholders, Ports would definitely be an industry sector that needs to understand their risks, so that they can actually disclose the financial implications of their climate risk to their shareholders.

The TCFD is significant as it moves climate adaptation from being a sustainability issue (often sitting within an environment portfolio within a port), to becoming a C-Suite risk issue that the CFO is going to be concerned about.

And that really is where it needs to be. It's crosscutting across the organization. It’s influencing planning, engineering, operations, water usage, and energy usage, to name a few.

As such, it needs to sit at a high enough level and have leadership-level endorsement to be effective.

这是真正的进化问题——the narrative changing from what we are doing to the environment – in terms of carbon emissions - to what is the environment going to do to us (in terms of climate impacts).

Fisk先生的同事,Louise Ledgard.(Director of Business Development, Critical Infrastructure atBMT Global), will be presenting case examples and guidance coveringa framework for port climate risk and adaptation在全球Dredging Forum.

书现在要听到主要港口扩张，绿地项目的第一手经验以及如何满足更大船舶的需求，以及增加的流量。