Learning from Flood Events on Critical Infrastructure: Relations and Consequences for Life and Environment (CIrcle)

It becomes increasingly clear that when a natural disaster occurs in modern society, the direct effects to critical infrastructure networks are not the only effects. Dependencies and interdepencies between different networks, like the energy network (figure 1a), transport network (figure 1b) and communication network (figure 1c), can cause unexpected consequences. Furthermore, indirect effects and cascading effects may have a more significant impact over a longer period of time than that of the direct effects. In 2014 the Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment of The Netherlands wrote a letter to the Dutch parliament concerning awareness of critical infrastructure (CI) when dealing with climate change related topics, like floods and droughts (Rijksoverheid, 2014). She was not just directing her comment at the stakeholders concerned with the CI, but at the inhabitants of the Netherlands as well. The interactive CIrcle tool that has recently been developed will be able to contribute to these goals by analysing and visualising cascading effects of CI networks.