Risk Assessment of the Disruption of Resource Movements from Flooding

Ensuring the continued flow of resources - such as materials, energy, and water - is crucial to securing resilience. Interdependencies between the infrastructures that enable the flow of these resources have the potential to increase the vulnerability of these systems to disruption via cascading mechanisms. To analyse the disruption of resource flows within interdependent systems, this paper introduces a resource model that pulls together two established modelling methodologies: input-output modelling and network analysis. Data on supply, demand and flows are typically only provided at coarse spatial scales, so an important development was the disaggregation of regional economic input-output data into smaller spatial units suitable for flood impacts analysis. The results highlight a large degree of interdependency between different industries that enables a flood that inundates 11,000 m² to disrupt 22% of the region's resource flows. Further analysis reveals that the magnitude of resource disruption responds non-linearly to the return period of the flood event. These interdependencies appear to amplify the disruption from flooding in the case study site, although different locations will exhibit different types of response.