Parallel Session A7: Climate Change Adaptation, Resilience-Building and DRR for Ports

Expert forum addresses climate change impacts on Caribbean supply chains and maritime infrastructure

An expert forum convened to address the critical issue of supply chain disruptions in the Caribbean and small island developing states (SIDS), with a particular emphasis on the impact of climate change on ports and maritime infrastructure. Regina Asariotis opened the forum by highlighting the severe economic consequences of failing to act against climate change, referencing a report by EDF titled “Act Now or Pay Later,” which estimated potential annual damages to ports and shipping at $25.3 billion by the end of the century. She stressed the importance of conducting thorough risk and vulnerability assessments to guide effective adaptation strategies.

The forum focused on the unique vulnerabilities of SIDS, emphasizing their dependence on transportation links for economic activities and the disproportionate impact of extreme weather events. Such events can obliterate years of economic growth, with loss and damage potentially exceeding annual GDP.

Professor Miguel Esteban from Waseda University in Japan provided practical examples of port adaptation, discussing the challenges faced by ports in adapting to sea-level rise and land subsidence. He highlighted ongoing adaptation measures in ports like Jakarta, where sections are raised to combat land subsidence.

David A.Y. Smith from Smith Warner International in Jamaica discussed changing trends in marine infrastructure design, presenting a case study of a winter swell event in Jamaica that caused significant damage to the Ocho Rios cruise terminal. He suggested that extreme swell events could be as destructive as hurricanes and should be included in future design considerations.

An audience member raised environmental concerns, questioning how ports could mitigate ocean pollution during adaptation processes. While no specific strategies were detailed, the importance of considering environmental impacts in adaptation design was acknowledged.

Willard Philips from ECLAC underscored the critical role of transportation infrastructure in the region and its importance in connecting to global supply chains. He pointed out the economic burdens and lost economic flows resulting from disruptions caused by natural disasters, emphasizing the need to integrate climate change and adaptation issues into port management.

The forum concluded with a consensus on the urgent need for action to adapt ports and maritime infrastructure to the impacts of climate change. It called for collaborative action involving all stakeholders, including public and private sectors, and a multidisciplinary approach to address the challenges effectively. The need for capacity building and better access to affordable adaptation finance for developing countries and SIDS was also underscored, focusing on avoiding maladaptation and over-engineering through thorough risk assessments and the adoption of innovative technical measures that consider ecosystem approaches.

Noteworthy observations from the forum included the recognition of the economic impact of seemingly benign events like swells, which can lead to substantial financial losses, as well as the acknowledgment of the aesthetic and operational impacts of natural phenomena like sargassum on port operations and cruise shipping. The forum highlighted the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, and infrastructural factors in addressing the challenges of climate change in the maritime sector.

Regina Asariotis:
Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for your interest. We’ve got a set of three consecutive sessions this morning dealing with a very critical issue for the Caribbean, for small island developing states in the Caribbean, but more broadly for global supply chains. The theme, the overarching theme, if you will, of this forum is how to address cascading crises which lead to supply chain disruptions, and there are multiple causes, one of which is climate change. And this is very much the focus of the set of interventions today. The speakers for this session, I’m going to kick off with some setting the scene effectively a little bit on the risks, the costs, the potential costs, and some of the issues that require action. And then I’m going to hand over to colleagues on the panel here. So we haven’t got the session card up at the moment, but it doesn’t matter. So we have here, first of all, after myself, Willard Phillips is going to talk, who is with ECLAC, a sub-regional office here in the Caribbean, in Trinidad and Tobago. And we will have one video presentation sent by Miguel Esteban, a professor at Waseda University in Japan. And then we have David Smith, David A. Y. Smith, from Smith Warner International. David, thank you very much. In Jamaica, one of the leading engineering company, coastal engineering companies in the region, all highly experienced in this field. So shall we start? Thank you very much for your interest. Let’s get going. I don’t need to explain to the audience here how critical supply chains are. So let’s just go straight to this issue of what could be the potential damage and also particularly the disruption. and delay and the associated costs and economic implications. There are huge costs associated with inaction, but it’s not that easy to quantify these. And we have some estimates, and they vary, but they zoom in on different aspects. So for example, EDF produced a report aptly named Act Now or Pay Later, the Cost of Climate Inaction for Ports and Shipping, which puts the potential damage from damage and port disruption up to $25.3 billion a year by the end of the century. That’s just a glimpse. There are two studies out by a team, Fashour et al. They have looked at annual port-specific risk from natural hazards in general, and they quantify that as $7.5 billion a year. And also the more systemic risk to global maritime transport trade and supply chains. So they put this at $81 billion a year for global trade, and then another, an additional $122 billion in economic activity. However, these are not small numbers, they’re not small figures, but actually they’re probably underestimates. Why is that? For one, the latter two estimates that you are on the top part of the slide, they don’t take into account projection of climate change. So this is the current state of affairs. Secondly, we must remember that, for example, a hurricane, a single event, can basically produce costs and damages in the billions. An example is up on the screen here for you, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the estimated damages were $62 billion US dollars, and included a very costly one-week shutdown of one of the largest US container ports. And now, of course, what are we measuring? So this does not take into account, even that estimate does not take into account. account, the knock-on effect on contracts, where people were delayed, got liable, had to make alternative arrangements, etc. That is not easy to estimate. For SIDS in particular, a single extreme event can wipe out years of economic activity, economic growth. So, loss and damage can exceed annual GDP. One example was, of course, in the case of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, which hit ten Caribbean nations straight on. For example, Dominica, the loss estimate, as imperfect as it is, put this at just under 300% of GDP. And then you have the added issue that, again, you have extended delay, like in Typhoon Mamie in Busan, closed the port for 91 days. So those of you who are in the business and think of what is the cost of a small strike, a short-term strike, you can just extrapolate from that. What I’m saying is that any one cost estimate is likely to be on the conservative side, simply because we can’t estimate exactly what’s happening. And then, of course, you’ve got the Panama Canal, which is a kind of outlier. We’ve heard already about this. But an unprecedented drought hit the Panama Canal in 2023 and caused massive disruption and delay. I have on the slide here, normally the Panama Canal takes care of 3% of world maritime trade and about half the containers from Northeast Asia to the east coast of the U.S. And what happened last year, this is just a couple of slides to show you, a couple of figures to show you the kind of bottleneck that this created. And this is the Gatun Lake water levels. This is a lake that feeds the locks. So you can see the gray or the light blue lines. This is sort of the time series since 1965. And look where the red line, which is happening last year, where this is, is unprecedented. So what happened there? Of course, there was disruption and delay. We heard something, some diversion of trade around the continent, increasing CO2 emissions as well. But also specifically, the cost of just passing the Panama Canal Authority auctions of slots. And according to industry reports, I think Lloyd’s list, the average slot price during this time in November, I think it was $1 million US. And the top slot was $4 million US just to cross. So all this to say, when we’re talking about economic costs, we do know it’s going to be vast in the absence of measures to mitigate these types of impacts and losses. So what are we going to do about it? To address something, you have to understand it, of course. So when we’re talking about the risk of impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on ports and on supply chains, how do we find out what the risk is? The IPCC has produced a very useful definition of risk, which differs somewhat from that of the insurance industry. So it’s not about the probability and the impacts. But it defines risk of impacts as a function, so like a mathematical equation, a function of hazards. This is changing climatic factors, which, of course, depend also on climate scenario and emissions, exposure of assets and people to these hazards, and the vulnerability, which is the capacity to respond and really includes everything, starting from governance, finance, technical measures, capacity, human capacity, et cetera. And of course, if the hazards are going up, unless you reduce the exposure and the vulnerability, the risk will grow. And the hazards are going up. And SIDS in particular, and we’re here in Barbados, so we give particular attention to the situation of SIDS, SIDS are exceptionally vulnerable because they’re They are both very much exposed, and they lack in many respects the capacity to address this effectively. So to deal with climate change impacts, we’ve got to assess and address these different aspects. I’ve said the hazards are going up, and this is just a snapshot. This is some work we did together with colleagues at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. What you see here is predicted changes in the return period of what used to be the one in 100 year extreme sea level. So this is one in 100 year sea level extreme is a common design parameter for newly constructed ports, and the baseline here is over the period 1986 to 2014. So what used to be an event at extreme sea level every once in a century could, under two degrees specific warming, two degrees global warming above pre-industrial levels, which we expect the IPCC in the sixth assessment report expects is no later than the 2050s. Probably earlier, but no later. At two degrees, the return period of this type of event would be every one to ten years in many tropical and subtropical regions. And at three degrees, which sadly we are collectively on track according to, for example, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report and a number of assessments, we are currently with existing policies, plans and pledges, we are on track to about 2.7 degrees by the end of the century. So if we have a scenario, imagine three degrees, then most or many ports, except those in very high latitudes, will expect this kind of baseline event several times per year. So what used to be once in 100 years, you might have to be prepared to suffer this several times a year. So on this slide, everything that’s red is bad, deep red. it is 0.1 times, so that means it could be 10 times. It’s quite worrying. And as you can see, this is 3,700 ports across global coastlines. So all the ports are affected. That doesn’t tell you what happens in an individual port, because you don’t know the elevation. You don’t know what damage it does. You don’t know what it does. So we did a project some years ago. It was a very good project, and we had the pleasure to conduct a regional workshop here in Barbados, bringing together port and airport authorities from about 25 countries and territories in the region just after the hurricane season in 2017. As part of this project, we had done flood risk assessments of ports and airports in Jamaica and St. Lucia. So what you see on the slide here is flood risk modeling for the two ports and the two airports that exist in St. Lucia. These are the only ports and airports in the countries. And under all scenario, they are at considerable risk as early as from 2030, when we expect the 1.5 degrees limit to be reached, or the threshold to be reached, which means there’s really no time to lose to adapt because, of course, SIDS are utterly dependent on their transport links. The Prime Minister Mottley at the opening mentioned sea bridges and air bridges. It’s obvious these countries are sea locked. So ports and airports are literal lifelines for all purposes, energy, food security, tourism, trade, people movement, and in the context of DRR and response and recovery. We need to do these kinds of assessments at local levels to understand what is happening and to take effective action. So let me come then to what has. We’ve been working on this type of issue, this complex of issues, for now 15 years. And as part of this work, what are some of the key insights that we’ve gained? What do we know needs to happen? We know what is critical is that we conduct high-quality risk and vulnerability assessments based on the best available evidence, science, to improve the understanding of impacts and to guide effective adaptation responses and prioritize resources accordingly. We have to improve data collection and availability, plan early, particularly in light of the asset lifespan, which is very, very long, and adopt a systems approach, so bear in mind that there’s a hinterland, that there are components in a port, that there’s a connected network. And above all, and this is why we need these high-quality risk and vulnerability assessments, because we have to avoid maladaptation. We can’t just build a wall somewhere and hope for the best. That is a waste of resources and can do more harm than good. So we have to avoid maladaptation and over-engineering. Of course we need innovative technical measures, very important, and we’ll hear a little bit about this in this session, and where possible, integrate ecosystems approaches, because that is a win-win. For the operational side of things, for port managers, it’s very important to bear in mind to mainstream these considerations. That doesn’t happen enough. So this is not something for consideration of the environmental team, but everybody involved in port planning and operations needs to bear these factors in mind as part of whatever else they’re doing, and that cannot be overemphasized. For developing countries in particular, and SIDS above all, we need capacity building and better access to affordable adaptation finance for ports, because these links are absolutely critical, and in the absence of timely action, the losses could be absolutely devastating. Globally, of course, let’s not forget, none of these losses are insurable by anybody, not by the reinsurance companies, the few that exist, if nothing is done about it. So there is an urgent need for action on adaptation everywhere, and policy and legal frameworks play an important role. role in this as to standards, guidance and methodologies. Importantly, on the policy side, is for national policymakers to integrate these considerations into their national adaptation plans, NDCs, but also development, DRR, COVID recovery policies and planning. And to round this off really, for all of this to work, we need concerted collaborative action, so involving all the stakeholders in public-private sectors, a multidisciplinary work. And we’ve been fortunate to have been working in this area a little bit. And I have come to the end, but I want to have one slide, which I thought, if time permits, just to show you the timeframes. This is from Mike Savonis, the lead of the US Gulf Coast Studies seminal piece of work, post-Hurricane Katrina, which just shows you the timeframe, the lifespan of this infrastructure might be 75 years, the planning involved might be 30 years. So if we want to avoid massive impacts, losses that far outweigh any costs of action, then we have to act quickly. So there’s really no time to lose, but are we prepared? We’ve done a survey a few years ago, but PIANC, World Association for Waterborne Infrastructure Center, later surveys were confirming the insights. And basically, we’re not prepared. The ports are not prepared as they should be. Thank you very much. So with that, this is just to set the scene, basically. Let me hand over to Willard Phillips from ECLAC, the Economic Commission for Latin America. and the Caribbean, the sub-region office here in Trinidad. And he’s going, well, you just get going.

Willard Philips:
Thank you very much, Regina. Good morning, everybody.

Regina Asariotis:
Could somebody please put the presentation up? Yes. Let me just introduce you then while we’re waiting. So, Willard Phillips is a very thoughtful man. He is working at ECLAC, and he has been thinking for a long time about the network implications, the regional network implications for redundancies. And so we’re very, very keen to obtain his perspective. Willard, please.

Willard Philips:
Thank you very much. I have been here two days now, and some of you have been here since Tuesday. And every time someone made a presentation, I kept wondering what would I eventually have to say, because pretty much everything that I was hoping to say has been already said. Nevertheless, it is my responsibility to, in a sense, highlight, I think, what by now would be some fairly benign ideas about the implications for small island developing states, and in this instance, the Caribbean’s small island developing states, with respect to the critical role of transportation infrastructure in the region, and its role, its importance in connecting to global supply chains. So pretty much what you would hear, I’m sure, would be, I imagine, would be cliches and so on. But in the context of the experience for small island developing states, to suggest that they are really very, they hold deep implications and it might serve you well to at least ponder a little bit of what I would share. And my fundamental message, my main message really is to say that the Caribbean is extremely vulnerable to natural hazards. That’s a cliche. Everyone, I think, we understand that. It is also highly trade and tourism dependent, one of the most tourism dependent regions in the world, and for that reason our seaports and airports are extremely critical infrastructure. Much of the conversation so far, I think, has given a focus to seaports, but in the case of small island developing states such as the Caribbean, we also see airports as being vital to maintaining our connection to the global supply chain. And I want to ask you to consider this scenario, for instance. We are here in Barbados and we’ve enjoyed the fine hospitality and the services, etc., but you need to keep this in mind that pretty much every aspect of your material experience here to date, pretty much most, if very close to 100 percent of that, you experience because of goods and services that were brought to these islands by ship. And so the chairs you are sitting on very likely came aboard. In other places, we like like to say that apart from gifts of God and gifts of nature, everything else comes by ship or plane, and that really, really conveys, I hope, a sense of the dependency of small island states on supply chain infrastructures. The other important aspect with respect to seaports in our part of the world is that our ports also serve to support cruise shipping business, and in this regard, Caribbean ports also handle large numbers of passengers, which is not typical for commercial ports. And there are important implications, important nuances that attend having to manage the movement of large numbers of passengers. Prior to the pandemic, the region received in the order of 34 million cruise visitors and approximately the same number, just a little more than 34 million stayover visitors. All stayover visitors, by and large, come by air and therefore will transit through our airports. So in that context, there’s no question that our ports, air and seaports, are very, very vital to the sustenance of our economies and our societies. And in the midst of that criticality, they are also vulnerable to disasters. And again, we like to say in the region that the Caribbean is paradise, and we think so. But there’s also another maxim among Caribbeans. people that says it costs to live in paradise. We won’t scare you, but you’re in one of the most naturally hazardous regions in the world, notwithstanding what you see. We manage, but it is a fact of life, and every form of natural hazard that you might imagine, we experience in the Caribbean, the most widely known ones are tropical cyclones, but we have seismic events, we have droughts, we have flooding, we have volcanic events. As recent as two years ago, next door in St. Vincent, we had a fairly recent eruption and so on. So this is a reality, and these impacts manifest themselves at our seaports and airports. In 2017, because this is for the record one of our most impactful seasons, we’ve had destruction to ports, seaports, facilities, airports, and even coastal roadways. In the case of seaports, what we’ve noticed is that the climate-driven impacts have resulted in our experiencing, on average, higher levels of storm surges, which destroy piers, cause flooding in ports, damage to infrastructure in ports, and so on. Similarly, at airports, we’ve had experience where terminals have been flooded, destroyed, communications and navigation equipment damaged, et cetera, et cetera. And importantly, as well, on islands such as these… these critical infrastructure are often linked by the main roadways on these islands and therefore even our public highways and roadways form part of that criticality. And there are, of course, economic impacts. Regina alluded a lot to some of those metrics in terms of the global experience, but in the Caribbean, these numbers are also apparent. I have a number here from the IMF that says roughly 2.4% of GDP estimated as a total loss over the period 1950 to 2016. And as Regina alluded to, we are confident that these are underestimations because they don’t take into account a number of other factors and variables that amount to the total impact on the economies and societies. A more reasonable number, I think, is somewhere in the order of just under $150 billion with respect to total losses among all SIDS countries in the region. And this, we know, has been documented elsewhere. On the graph, we have, for instance, a couple of the countries that have been impacted most significantly over the last decade or so. And unfortunately, the Bahamas is one of those countries that has had quite an extensive amount of impact in the last decade. But the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Haiti, in this instance, were two major seismic events. It’s also in here. But several other countries can find representation on that. this graph. And here I share just an image of the situation that obtained in Dominica with just hopefully to convey the effect of extraordinary storm surge with the passage of Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this is the case of St. Martin where Hurricane Irma caused extensive destruction to its terminals again in 2017. There are several implications of course because extreme weather events ultimately suggest additional economic burdens for reconstruction, rebuilding, but lost economic flows as well because during periods of disruptions these facilities, these infrastructures are non-functional and therefore cannot facilitate the economic activities that are necessary for generating revenues and taxes and jobs, etc., etc. The passage of events in the region also disrupt the cruise business, which I’ve alluded to as being important, as well as the marina services. And this is not one that we’ve referenced a lot, but the region also has large numbers of marinas, which of course are on the coast, and their services are also disrupted with the passage of these events. And from the standpoint of climate mitigation, we spoke extensively yesterday about the evolving… requirements on the IMO for new fuel standards, et cetera, et cetera. And these also bear some implications for economies in terms of adjusting to those new regulatory standards. One other issue that we note is that with the increased ambient temperatures, we know that this also has an impact on the productivity of port workers, whether they be seaport or airports. Again, this is benign but also a significantly projected impact we expect in the foreseeable future. As I come to close off this presentation, I want to put, for your reference, a couple strategic issues. You may call them recommendations. They are very obvious that these are requirements to be to be taken into account as we confront the challenge of maintaining our connectivity to global supply chains. Minimizing operating costs, of course, are going to be critical because the region has a challenge from the standpoint of seaports in attracting and maintaining our connectivities. Commercial shipping operators are not always well disposed to coming into small ports for which they face high risks of operations, high operating costs, et cetera, et cetera. I reference the whole requirement for accommodating crews and both domestic passengers in regional ports. This is important because in the Caribbean as well you have many multi-island states. which also have to facilitate the intra-within-the-sovereign-jurisdiction movement of our passengers. One important issue that I want to put on the table here in terms of a strategic issue is to recognize that in conditions of disasters or natural events, our ports also play an important role in restoring and returning to normalcy after an event, which is to see managing, handling the movement of humanitarian aid or response supplies. And in this regard, the question of redundancy for regional ports in small island states becomes very, very important. This is an issue, I think, would require deep discussion and consideration because most regions, most countries in the regions have only a single seaport, and if they have more than one, typically this would be a specialized additional port. And so this is the question of building out redundancy for treating with the impacts of hazards becomes very, very much an important issue. And overall, I think the issue of mainstreaming climate change and adaptation issues into port management becomes very, very important, very critical, and very necessary. I thank you for your attention.

Regina Asariotis:
Thank you very much, Willard. That was, as I was expecting, nothing less than a very thoughtful presentation. It’s early in the morning, everybody’s still a little bit tired and groggy, you speak very slowly, but I very much hope that everybody will have absorbed fully what you’ve been saying, because you make very important points that are very rarely raised. We’re already a little bit over time, but we have the good fortune that we have a two-hour block, if you will, before we have a coffee break so we can sort of move around a little bit. There is an MP3, there’s a video presentation, which we’d like to show now, because one highly qualified speaker was unable to come. He’s in Japan, Professor Esteban from Waseda University. What’s very interesting about him is that he has worked extensively in the field on port adaptation, and that includes both highly industrialized countries like Japan, but also Indonesia and indeed in the Pacific Islands and so on. So he has a very good overview, and the MP3, the video that is going to be shown now, is the technical quality is not the best, but the content is very good. So I hope you’ll find it of interest. Could somebody please start? Thank you.

Miguel Esteban:
How this will affect ports. So my name is Miguel Esteban, and I’m a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Everybody talks about climate change and its effects, but comparatively little work has been done on climate change in ports, and it is very important to try to understand how much climate change is actually going to cost to ports and infrastructure. So there are major challenges facing port construction in the future, and some of these challenges are sea level rise, which is going to force the ports to raise the ground levels, and it’s going to force the reinforcement of breakwaters, and there’s going to be an increase in tropical cyclone intensity or typhoons, hurricanes, and this is going to increase port downtime and, again, force breakwaters to be reinforced. I want to talk to you about Tokyo Bay. So there are a number of ports in Tokyo. Tokyo is the largest urban area in the world. It has about 36 million people, and it is a very large economy in itself within Japan. There are a number of ports around Tokyo Bay. You have the Port of Tokyo, which is one of the largest Japanese ports. It has an annual capacity of about 100 million tons of cargo, 4.5 TUs, and 30,000 employees. But there are other ports, like the Port of Yokohama. Here you can see a graph of how it looks. There’s also the Port of Kawasaki and many other ports around Tokyo Bay. Now, of course, many of you know about sea level rise, and the IPCC says, for example, that by the end of the IPCC’s sixth assessment process, by the end of the century, sea level rise could rise by about almost a meter, but there’s other research which said it could be even higher than that. It’s warming sea temperatures. Of course, it’s difficult to really estimate this as we – how much – that any damage in the past has been increased by climate change because we occupy larger portions of the planet. But it does seem to be that typhoons, tropical cyclones, or hurricanes, as you may call them, will increase in intensity due to warming oceans, and this is because these events draw – these storms draw the energy from the warm seas. And because of this, well, the storm surges will likely increase in height, and this will, again, increase – become even worse in the future due to the rising sea levels. We estimated – we did some simulations to estimate what a one-in-100-year typhoon would look like in Tokyo Bay. We took for this the Taisho Six-Year Typhoon in 1917 as a target typhoon. This was the last typhoon that caused large-scale flooding to Tokyo Bay and had many consequences. There was a storm surge as a consequence of this which killed over 1,000 people. It destroyed many houses and flooded large areas of Tokyo, 215 square kilometers. Of course, what we did is we used this target area, Tokyo Bay, and here you can see the grids that we used. We used a nesting approach to estimate the effect that it would have to various ports around Tokyo. In the future, as I said before, tropical cyclones are likely to increase in intensity, and for this we used a change in central typhoon pressure distribution from Yasuda Atoll, and we obtained that the equivalent in the future would be instead of 952 hectopascals, it would likely increase to 933 for the same return period. And what does this mean? That the storm surge would likely come 0.2 to 0.5 meters higher. And, of course, for different sea-level rise scenarios, then we can estimate the amount of damage, and you can see here for either Tokyo or Kanagawa – Kanagawa is a prefecture to the south of Tokyo – the inundation height, then the inundation extent for different combinations of storm surge height and sea-level rise scenarios. So, we also have studied ports in Jakarta. So, as you may know, Tokyo suffers from land subsidence in the 20th century, and Jakarta is currently also suffering from land subsidence, which was up to 10 to 20 centimeters per year. So, through the study of this land subsidence, we can try to understand how ports will likely have to adapt to rising sea-level waters in the future. So, if you want, land subsidence can be used as an analogy for sea-level rise. And we studied different places in Jakarta, for example, the area of Pluit, which is several meters below sea level at the moment. And this is one of the ports in Pluit, in the East Pluit area. This is Sunda Kelapa Port. And you can see here that the residential area has some dikes in front. And because of the land subsidence, now these porters have to use this small curve to prevent the water from flooding into the port at high tide. Now, this is the oldest port in Jakarta, suffering from about 10 centimeters of subsidence per year, and it’s spending 20 percent of their annual income on adaptation. And what they do is they raise section by section. So, in the top photo, you can see the previous section of the port, the older part of the port, which this curve to prevent flooding. And on the bottom section, you can see one of the areas which has been raised more recently and which just looks like a normal port. Whenever they have the money, they get some sheet piles. They pile some rubble behind them, or whatever material they can find, and they reserve it. And this is what some of the older part of the port looks like. As you can see the flooding, the water percolating through. And here you can see the area of the port that’s just been raised, which is basically dry. And the port doesn’t see any technological, cost-benefit, financial, or social conflict barriers. The government will ultimately have to pay, and the stakeholders want this port to continue to be raised. And another port, Nissan Sahaman Port, again in Jakarta. Here you can see a video of what it looks like. So, the areas, you can see this walkway which is used to access the ships. And outside it, the area is flooded because of this land. subsidence and a new dike is being built further out as you can see here at the time when we looked at when we were looking at this port. Now again land subsidence of 10 meters the port has been raised in 2002 then again in 2012 and here you can see again the one section that has been raised and this is done sequentially whenever they have money they do it and they do one part of the port and then a different part of the port. Again they use sheet piles and they place some rubble or some material and then they resurface the top. No technological limits they can continue doing this for a long time no financial barriers the government will pay social barriers none but would it be better to move to a floating port and one anchor port another port in Jakarta and here you can see me and some of my students and colleagues in this photo together with the port official and again the port has been raised three times and in this next slide you can see this is what it looks like the time so the higher section is the time the last time the port was elevated and here you can see Jakarta and these are reclaimed areas in Jakarta but anyway going back you can see the higher section is the last time they raised the port the central section is the previous time and what’s on the water was the port before if you want to and of course you see some tetrapods now which are on the water because of this. They’re using sheet piles and again putting some material and resurfacing the top. They reckon they can only do this two or three times more before they reach the limit of the piles and they’re wondering whether it would it be better just to move to a floating port and they’ve started to experiment with that so here you can see some piles and then these units which are just floating next to the concrete section that they just elevated. So also in Tohoku after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami land subsided by up to one meter in some places so here’s one of the port areas that you can see and you can see how it was before and we’re going to see another port in Ishinomaki again one meter land subsidence and in this case one of the problems that they have in Japan is earthquakes so different to Jakarta they actually have to use these piles in order to adapt and this is very very expensive actually using these piles. Extra land subsidence they could still adapt quite easily but anything above that they would have to the piles would become a lot more expensive so but they didn’t do any cost benefit but again ultimately the government would have to pay. We did another port Kamaishi port in Japan and we compiled a list of the cost so far of the different ports that we encountered how much did the officials tell us it would cost to for the Tokyo as I said before so the areas Tokyo face land subsidence in the past and there are some areas that are lower than seawater at present but anyway look into the future if the sea levels continue to increase some areas outside of the current dikes would have to be raised so we estimated the cost of that and it would be quite significant to elevate the areas of the cost of the port but again ultimately as many people said the government would have to pay. There’s also issues with port downtime as a tropical cyclone either typhoon hurricane or cyclone approaches the port then the ports would have to stop operating when the wind speed increases to over 30 knots so we did some simulations of what would this mean and for example we found out that in the future according to the and in the future the ports will likely be closed for longer periods of time than they are at present due to these bigger typhoons. We estimated the increase in port downtime to different Japanese ports for a controlled present-day scenario and two climate change scenarios and yes this of course this increase in port downtime is seasonal dependence it’s more it’s higher during the times when the tropical during the tropical cyclone season and we also estimated that to compensate for that the ports would have to grow bigger in order to when to be able to deal with this increase in downtime so they would have to be bigger to then rebound if you want so we estimated how much this would cost according to these graphs and so said the ports would have to be bigger in the future to compensate with it for this increased uncertainty and yes we estimated how much so between 30 and 127 billion additional yen would be required to be invested by the year 2085 and otherwise the Japanese economy could be affected and so in conclusion strong tropical cyclones and sea level rise could lead to the inundation of many port areas and these would have to be elevated in the future to cope with these effects and breakwaters and other infrastructure should be strengthened as a consequence and stronger tropical cyclones cyclones will also lead to increased downtime and bottlenecks in supply systems and if you don’t compensate for that the losses could be substantial not only for ports but for major population centers so that’s all thank you for your attention

Regina Asariotis:
it’s very nice that you’re clapping because of course he’s in Japan and it’s very nice if you found it of interest as you can see the quality is very very good the quality of the video wasn’t very good but this is and he has this manner anyway about him he just says so you know it’s like this and you lose 20 percent of GDP and we go on but it’s quite something and you can see the adaptation issues in practice in ports of different sizes so with that I’m going to hand over to David Smith from Smith Warner International in Jamaica who’s going to now think a little bit or share with us his thoughts about redesigning or rethinking design standards in the light of these types of impacts so David you have the floor thank you Regina appreciate it

David A.Y. Smith:
Good morning, everyone. I’m going to give a brief presentation on my thoughts on what I see changing trends in some of the considerations for marine infrastructure design. So as you know, we are in an archipelagic region. Many ports all around our countries. Not as large as those in the US, of course, but they serve a very critical role. This has been highlighted quite a few times by previous presenters. One of the sites that I looked at, ports.com, indicates that there are over 250 ports in the Caribbean. Some of them are small, tiny ports. Some are much larger and more substantial. But from time to time, all of them need some sort of repair, upgrading, or perhaps there’s creation of new ports. The maritime sector, transport sector, which includes cargo and crews, of course, is a very key and important sector for our Caribbean economies. It helps to create jobs, reduces poverty, and it helps us, basically, in growth. So the conventional wisdom for us has been that in designing marine facilities, particularly those that protect the vessels and the infrastructure, we use hurricane wave forces to provide the limit state conditions, the design conditions. Previous presenter from Japan, Miguel Esteban, spoke about this in terms of need to upgrade the strength of breakwaters. So in that regard, I just want to look at another case study. Brief one. Happened this year. Between February 4th and 6th, we had a winter swell event that affected the north coast of Jamaica. So, it came from the northwest direction. It generated waves that were about 3.8 meters, it was quite high. There was a constant wind of about 14 meters per second and the event lasted in excess of 48 hours. It was a long event for which the north coast was bombarded by large waves. We can focus now on the cruise terminal at a town called Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica. For those of you who are not familiar with the geography of Jamaica, this is primarily a cruise terminal location. There’s another section that takes cargo but not at this location. And that event caused some significant damage to our infrastructure there. We get a sense of it in these photographs. The top of the image shows one of the mooring stations that’s completely demolished. And the picture to the right gives an impression of the height and overtopping of waves from breaking waves that we had which were quite large. So I’m going to show a video, I hope this works, that was taken as a wave comes under the infrastructure and heads towards the coast. Here we go. So you can see the uplift on those elements. The wave itself doesn’t seem that impressive until it reaches the shore, which happens about now. So that caused significant damage, as you saw those uplift forces, which are tremendous. And that section of the port was shut down from February. It has not been restored to operation. yet, so it’s over 90 days. Speaking of disruptions, right, so we were asked, our company was tasked by Port Authority of Jamaica to look at the event in some detail, and we did. We examined records from European climate, medium-term climate reporting forecasting center, and we established, we extracted 45 years of information from that database, and in that database we saw that there were a total of about 700, over 700 hurricanes and swell events, sorry, that were found. And that, this event that happened in February of this year, if we looked at the wave energy coming from these events, it ranked sixth, and if we looked at wave heights only, it ranked eighth. It was quite significant. You can see from the graph on the left that the, I think the first storm, the high green bar is Hurricane Irma. It had a lot of wave energy, right? So, but this event was punishing for the structures and infrastructure at that port, and in fact at a bunch of other places on the north coast, in Montego Bay, for instance. So, when we looked from a directional perspective, if we said, okay, what has come in from the northwest only? Well, the data told us that this was the strongest storm that had come from that direction in 45, in over 45 years. It may have been a 1 in 50 or 1 in 60 year return period, we’re not sure, because the background data doesn’t take us back that far, but we know that it was extremely significant, it was quite large, and it went on for a long time. This is longer than would have happened with a hurricane condition. So it was particularly damaging, right? So it resulted in a lot of damage to marine infrastructure. And one of the implications of this for us is that in going forward, it may be that changing climate norms might force us now to include winter swells in the design, in our design toolbox, if you will, for wave-induced forces on marine infrastructure. So I just wanted to do a quick recap. This is our present design approach, trying to capture this in a simple graphic. So we would use operational. So trade wind waves and winter swells typically will tell you, does this facility that you’re building have an impact on adjacent shorelines? What’s the impact of it? Or what about run-up? Or is it creating resonance, for instance, in the marine? And that goes into one part of the facility design, whereas input from tropical storms and hurricanes tells us what is the maximum level of overtopping we could expect, maximum run-up, what are the maximum forces that need to be designed for. So this is how the flow is, another way of looking at that flow. We use this operational and extreme event information to give us recommendations as to setbacks and elevations for walkways. And we use the extreme stuff to give us recommendations for the size of protective armor or walls that are needed on breakwaters. But if we think about inclusion of swells into that mix, then our design approach changes. Now when we look at the force elements on the protective parts of the marine infrastructure. We consider, as usual, tropical storms and hurricanes, but no, the indication is that we should be bringing in the impacts of extreme swells because they’re gonna exert very strong uplift forces because of the nature of those swell waves. They’re very, what we call, long period waves, or long waves. Because of the, also because of the length of time that we see these swell events happening over, there’s a potential for structure fatigue to take place, which could be more marked than for hurricanes. And then finally, because of their directional uniqueness, whereas with a hurricane, as a hurricane moves past your location, because of the rotational characteristic of hurricanes, the waves will come from different directions. With this event, the waves came from one direction for the entire duration of that event. So, the directional significance of it is very important in port planning and in estimation of forces on ports. So, just some key takeaways in the design of structural protective elements of a port. I’m suggesting that we do some more research into swell wave records, in addition to bringing those with hurricane records. The swell information may be obtained from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. It’s downloaded as something that we call an ERA-5 product. And hurricane data, of course, is obtainable back to 1850 from the National Hurricane Center. And finally, we’re suggesting that extreme swells could be as destructive as hurricanes in some situations, and their unidirectionality makes them particularly troubling for some port layouts. Thank you.

Regina Asariotis:
Thank you very much, David. That was very interesting, and I want to just highlight to the people in this room, there are not very many people who work on these issues in practice, on adaptation for ports. It doesn’t mean that ports don’t adapt. That is obviously part of what they do as well. But there isn’t that much of a focus, and we’re very fortunate, very privileged to have these insights here. But what you mentioned about swell, David, if I could just relay, when we did a project involving, in the Caribbean, the port manager of another major cruise port in Falmouth, in Jamaica, mentioned that swell had cost them 15 ship calls, and we did a brief calculation, and that amounted to four and a half million dollars, just the swell, just a few ship calls. So you can just see how important it is to address these types of issues effectively. With that, let me hand over now. We are basically starting the next session in a minute. I would like to just see if there is any burning question by anybody. Otherwise, we’ll leave the discussions. to the end. Yes, ma’am. Is there somebody with a microphone? You take this.

Audience:
Thank you very much. I would like to say thank you to all of the panelists for sharing their insights with us today. My question is about in the adaptation of ports for climate resilience, we saw in the video of one of the Indonesian ports presented by Professor Esteban, there was some debris that was in the water as a result of raising the level of the ports. So I wanted to ask how in the design and adaptation of this port, how do they mitigate ocean pollution and take other environmental considerations into account? Thank you.

David A.Y. Smith:
Okay, now it’s on. Right, so you’re asking how do they mitigate against—well, I noticed in Professor Esteban’s presentations that subsidence is a big thing in Jakarta for their ports, right? So the land is always sinking and the sea level is always rising, hence why they needed to fill. But honestly, I don’t know how they would minimize marine pollution in those scenarios.

Regina Asariotis:
Yes, there’s a gentleman in the back.

Audience:
Thank you. Just a question in terms of the designs of your jetties, the port designs that you have shown, like for us in the Pacific, we adopt more like a column of piers and raised slabs over the years, but then a few cyclones has really damaged those designs and there has been some redesigns to have a look at putting in sheet piles and then backfills from inland. Would that be the ideal design moving forward to counter the effects of cyclones and swells that normally happens during disasters like this? What would be your take on that?

David A.Y. Smith:
For the facilities that I have seen where they are using piles and a cast deck, I have seen quite a few hurricane or typhoon scenarios where the deck has been popped off the piles, so they have had to demolish the whole thing and start again. It happened in St Kitts actually a couple of times. In Jamaica you saw on the slide that I showed where there was damage to that mooring section. So it may be that by putting in sheet piles, backfilling, you get a more robust type of structure and you could possibly raise that as they have done in Jakarta to prevent or adapt for rising sea levels. The downside to the sheet piles is that it is a very reflective structure, so it makes for what I call a noisy wave environment in the vicinity of the structure, to be quite honest. That is the downside for it. But you would get away certainly from some of that. some of the effects that we’ve seen here. Is that, so that’s, you’ve had a problem, you’re saying, with damage to piles and decks. Yeah.

Regina Asariotis:
Thank you very much.

Willard Philips:
I just wanted to respond not to the last comment, but the question this colleague asked regarding, I think you were speaking to how we would treat with marine pollutants. Admittedly, I don’t have an answer, but I thought it was opportune to highlight. I know, I think I know why you raise it, because in our reality here in the region, this is a question that I suspect we will come more frontally to have to treat with as we go along. The particular experience I want to reference here is the question of sargassum, because sargassum seaweed, as we’ve done some preliminary work, and we know that for small ports such as we have, and the fact, again, that we are so highly reliant on cruise shipping, this is an issue. This is, for our case, it’s not man-made, but it, in a sense, reflects the reality that would likely arise where we don’t have well-managed pollution that comes into the coastal areas. I have done, been trying to discover for the Caribbean any area where port operations have actually been impacted by the presence of Sargassum. I’ve not yet been able to pin down specifically where port operations came to a halt. I know of an empirical experience reported in one of the, I think it was in Marie Galant, one of the French territories, where the ingress of such large volumes of Sargassum was sufficient on an occasion to actually shut the port down. But apart from the operational side of it, there’s the aesthetic side of it where some cruise businesses would hesitate to call at certain ports where it is clear that you have a very extensive accumulation of Sargassum seaweed. This is a natural event that has been affecting the Caribbean since 2011 or thereabouts. There are several theories as to what has caused it, but presumably one can also imagine that if we were to have other events—oil slicks, oil pollution, etc.—they may not actually impact the mechanical, if you wish, operations of the port, but they could also have significant economic impacts because of lost business or hesitancy on the part. Cruise liners don’t like to sail their ships into dirty ports. It’s not good optics for them. It’s not good marketing. When we have these kinds of concerns, they also have the potential to generate unanticipated economic impacts as well. question you ask, notwithstanding that we don’t have specific answers. But I think it is going to become increasingly a peculiarity, a peculiar issue that we have to again treat with within the context of this small Caribbean port, small island developing states.

Regina Asariotis:
Thank you very much. And we can I think circle back to this in the course of the next set of presentations. So just to say, thank you very much to the both of you, to Professor Esteban in OECD University. And we move now to our next sort of panel. But of course you also, I know you will be staying around and hopefully we can continue the conversation. We have in the following panel, in the next panel, we have one speaker who had to cancel at short notice. So one speaker less, which means we have a bit, we make up a little bit for the time issue. So thank you very much.