Airports, Ports, and Climate Change (part 2)
December 2019

This is the second in a two-part Infrastructure Ideas series on the effects of climate change on infrastructure transport facilities, following part 1 on airports. This post will survey climate change impacts on ports around the world.

Over 3700 maritime ports and their supply chains enable global and local commerce, helping the over 90% of the world’s freight that moves by sea. Ships make on average some 3 million landings a year at ports around the world. One study found that ports and ships account for as much as one-quarter of the GDP of the United States, contributing over $5 trillion to the US economy alone. All of these ports are, by definition (leaving out “dry ports” which have their own importance in logistics chains) located by water. As climate change accelerates, and waters rise, all of these ports will be affected by a range of consequences, some of them expensive.

The EU’s Joint Research Center projects that by 2030 64% of all seaports are expected to be inundated by sea level rise, due to the combined effects of tides, waves, and storm surges. The number of ports that face the risk of inundation in 2080 is expected to increase further by 80% to 2080. While various climate change projections may have considerable uncertainty, depending on the combination of how much higher carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations get (uncertain because possible future emission trajectories are all over the place) and of feedback loops (on which key pieces of the science remain untested), two things are very clear: (1) sea levels will rise, and (2) they will rise more in some places than others. In Europe, it is forecast that the North Sea (where 15% of total world cargo is handled), the Western part of the Baltic Sea, and parts of the British and French Atlantic coasts will see double the sea level rise of most of the rest Europe’s coastline. In the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, impacts from extreme high sea level are expected to be significantly milder, but also to occur more frequently. One analysis projects that once-in-a-century “extreme sea levels” will on average occur approximately every 11 years by 2050, and every 3 and 1 year by 2100 under more extreme warming scenarios. The analysis adds that “some regions are projected to experience an even higher increase in the frequency of occurrence of extreme events, most notably along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where the present day 100-year ESL is projected to occur several times a year.”

One might superficially think that rising water levels would, for seaports, be a matter of indifference, or even a plus. As opposed to airports, where airplanes affected by inundation become useless, ports are home to ships which float on top of the water – no matter how high the water is. Dredging might become less of a concern in some ports, and other ports may become less dependent on high tides for larger cargo ships to enter. But while it is no doubt true that climate change impacts will be more severe for airports than for ports, they will not be absent for port owners and operators. A 2011 case study published by the International Finance Corporation, on a port in Colombia, summarized well the issues, of which the two biggest are the storage and movement of goods, and multimodal connectivity inland from the port. Ships can keep floating as the waters rise, but containers of goods cannot. Spoilage risk can be expected to affect revenues in particular for ports handling grains and other perishables. The fairly small number of transshipment ports may not worry too much about inland connectivity, but the large majority of operators will be need to be concerned about impacts of high waters on infrastructure which they do not control – roads, and sometimes rail lines – in and out of the port to other parts of their region. A review of risks to Long Beach Port, one of the busiest in the world, notes that “in the next few decades, access roads could be covered in water; rail lines, either from heat or from ocean water inundation, would be unusable; electrified infrastructure such as cranes could stop working. The piers themselves, particularly older piers in the center of the sprawling 3,000-acre Long Beach complex, would be swallowed by sea and flood water, leaving them inaccessible to trains and trucks”. As the Colombia study also notes in passing, ports in developing and emerging markets may often also have unpaved areas which can be damaged more severely by inundations.

In this context, many ports face both pressure to participate in mitigation/ decarbonization efforts, and pressure to think ahead about adaptation. On mitigation, ome larger ports have had the luxury of trying to get on the front foot in the public debate. Seven ports — Hamburg, Barcelona, Antwerp, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Vancouver and Rotterdam – announced in September 2018 the creation of a “World Ports Climate Action Program,” aimed at working together to find ways to reduce CO2 emissions from maritime transport. Their program has five action areas:

1. Increase efficiency of supply chains using digital tools.
2. Advance policy approaches aimed at reducing emissions within larger geographical areas.
3. Accelerate development of in-port renewable power-to-ship solutions.
4. Accelerate the development of commercially viable sustainable low-carbon fuels for maritime transport and infrastructure for electrification of ship propulsion systems.
5. Accelerate efforts to fully decarbonize cargo-handling facilities in ports.

The Port of Oslo last month announced a 17-point climate-action plan, with the goal of becoming the world’s first zero-emissions port. The port produces 55,000 metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions a year. By 2030, the port aims to make an 85% reduction in its emissions of carbon dioxide, sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter. The plan includes refitting ferry boats, implementing a low-carbon contracting process, and installing shore power, which would allow boats to cut their engines and plug into the grid when docked. Shore power can also power equipment like cranes, which normally run on diesel. Oslo incentivizes replacement of diesel with lower port fees and electricity costs to reward compliant ships, and by revising contracting processes to command terminal builders and shipping companies to obey low-emission rules. Rotterdam, which is Europe’s biggest port, is using zero-emission port equipment, while two months ago the Port of Los Angeles unveiled two new battery-electric top loaders.

Oslo’s plan is also of specific interest in that Oslo is a major port for ferries running across the Baltic straights; these ferries are estimated to be responsible for half the port’s emissions, a function of their frequency. Oslo has awarded a contract to Norled to electrify existing passenger ships; Norled delivered the first electric refit in September, and the ship now has the equivalent of 20 Tesla batteries on board. In a further sign of growing interest toward electrification among the industry, last month Washington State Ferries, which runs the second-largest ferry system in the world, announced it is switching from diesel to batteries. Washington State Ferries carry 25 million people a year across Puget Sound, and its annual fuel consumption is on par with that of a midsize airline, making it the state’s biggest diesel polluter. The ferry operator’s electrification program will start with the three most polluting vessels, which consume 5 million gallons of fuel a year between them; switching the three ships to fully electric operations would cut emissions by an estimated 48,000 metric tons of CO2 a year, the equivalent of taking 10,000 cars off the road. This will also require a major quayside electrification effort. Canada’s British Columbia Ferry Services, another major operator, moved to LNG some time ago and is now eyeing electrification of its fleet. This August also saw the launch of the world’s largest all-electric ferry to date, a 200-passenger, 30-car carrying vessel in Denmark, while in July the U.K. government announced that all new ships would have to be equipped with zero-emission technology.

On adaptation, almost all ports will need to take some sort of action to deal with rising waters, and more frequent extreme weather events bringing flooding. Key areas will be in protecting goods being stored and moved within ports, and inland transport connections. So far, the approach being taken by most ports is the obvious one – trying to keep water out of where it’s not wanted, and European ports are in the forefront. Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London are known to be protected against a 1 in 1000-year event, or at least what has been thought of as 1 in 1000-year events. Rotterdam’s measures are of the highest level globally, consisting of two of the largest storm surge barriers in the world. London’s flood barrier is also among the biggest in the world. These kinds of defenses do not come cheap. According to a recent study by consultancy Asia Research and Engagement (ARE), upgrading some of the 50 largest ports in the Asia-Pacific region to help cope with the effects of climate chance could cost up to $49 billion.

Future port adaptation measures are likely to be far more extensive than those implemented to date, and to require more varied technical approaches. Chances are pretty good, as estimates of how much and how soon sea levels will rise keep getting ratcheted up, that current forecast numbers for seawall-type protections will escalate quickly – as in the example of San Francisco’s barrier, whose projected cost jumped in a few years from $50m to over $500m. Chances are also pretty good that other complementary solutions will be needed, along the lines of major drainage improvements and ways to elevate storage facilities. Unless some radical positive change takes place, rising sea levels are likely to inexorably make seawalls regularly obsolete unless they too keep getting (expensively) raised, and solutions that focus more on the parts of ports that have to keep dry make be most cost-effective. Finally, chances are pretty good that new kinds of private-public partnerships for adaptation will be needed. Inland connecting infrastructure is more often owned by local governments that port operations are, and those governments struggle more than port operators to find revenues with which to fund raising and hardening that connecting infrastructure. Ports may find they need to help governments put in place the improvements to connecting infrastructure, without which ports will find their revenue streams drying up – all puns intended.

Airports, Ports, and Climate Change (part 1)
December 2019

Last month, Denmark announced that Kangerlussuaq Airport — Greenland’s main airport — is set to end civilian flights within five years due to the melting of permafrost cracking its runway. Infrastructure investors take note – this is the first airport worldwide to close due to climate change, but unlikely to be the last. A new greenfield facility will have to be built to accommodate future flights.

A year earlier, Osaka’s Kansai International Airport was largely closed for 17 days, when waves and winds from Typhoon Jebi breached a seawall. In June 2017, American Airlines cancelled 40 flights out of Phoenix, Arizona, as extreme heat made it too difficult for smaller jets to takeoff from the airport.

Welcome to the future of airports.

Climate change is arriving, faster and worse than most projections estimated. For airport operators and investors, this will entail more of the type of consequences already being seen in Greenland, Japan, and Arizona. The current Infrastructure Ideas issue will outline some of these consequences, while the subsequent issue will examine the future of ports in a time of climate adaptation.

Emissions Mitigation. The world’s airlines are expected to fly over 4.5 billion passengers in 2019 (yes, almost a flight for every person on the planet), up by a billion since 2015. This high growth is driving very large capital investment plans for airports, as well as rising emissions. The aviation industry is estimated to be responsible for more than 850 million tons of CO2 emissions annually, about 3% of all global emissions. Emissions from jets are thought to have more harmful effects than many other sources of emissions, as they get released higher up in the atmosphere. Given air traffic projections, emissions from aviation are projected to triple by 2050. This has led in the past few years to increasing concerns, in the context of increasingly dire warnings from the scientific community about the pace and severity of climate change. Already in 2016 the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, agreed to cap carbon emissions from international flights, starting in 2021 – an agreement which may prove difficult to implement if passenger growth continues as projected. Some airlines are also trying to get on the front foot: United Airlines announced a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2050. How this will be done, and whether it will be enough to offset the onset of major regulatory limits, remains to be seen. As start-up technology companies explore the launch of “air taxi” services, domestic flight emissions may also see accelerated growth. Industry players should expect that there is likely to be increased conflict between political emission reduction objectives on the one hand and unabated passenger growth on the other. Therefore investors in the sector may do well to factor the risk of political action either taxing flights and/or limiting flights, and therefore reducing the overall needs for capital investment in airport expansions. Arguments can also be seen already that controlling the expansion of airports themselves is an important tool to curbing airline emissions (see Curbed, Want to Get People to Fly Less? Stop Funding Airport Expansions).

Airports themselves emit a tiny fraction of the GHGs that airlines do – at least directly. Their own operations are far less likely to face political pressure of the type that airlines will. Nonetheless a climate neutral accreditation exists and has enrolled many facilities, whose efforts focus on meeting energy needs through renewables and improved efficiency, on the use of hybrid or electric vehicles, and on public/group transit facilitation for employees. Potential emission reductions of this type may be largest in airports located in lower-income countries, which often see a combination of less-modern/ less-efficient operational equipment and older less-fuel efficient aircraft. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, for example, has achieved major GHG reductions by purchasing power units for parked aircraft which run on electricity, rather than diesel as the older units had. This is good — yet the indirect emissions related to airports are significant, and may prove to be more of a political target in the future. Indirect emissions would be mainly two elements: how many flights airport capacity allows, and transport emissions from people getting to and parking at an airport. As noted above, activism is beginning to target the issue of airport capacity expansions as a means of curbing airline emissions. It is likely that in the near future, the efficiency of passengers reaching an airport starts attracting attention, with arguments for parking expansions to be replaced by public transit, for example. At one level further removed, one can also anticipate growing pressure for investment in passenger rail services, coupled with increased taxation of short-haul flights, to attempt to shift traffic from air to rail for short-distance travel (as most fuel is burned on take-off and landing, making short flights more carbon-intensive flights). The bigger climate change worry for airports, however, is likely to be adaptation.

Adaptation needs: water. Water has gone from a friend of airports to a foe. In many cities, airports were built near seacoasts to minimize disturbances to humans or avoid natural obstacles like mountains. Now that water is rising, and airports are some of the most vulnerable infrastructure to sea level rise. In the USA, 13 of the country’s 47 largest airports have at least one runway that is vulnerable to storm surge, including the giant facilities in New York, Miami and San Francisco. Globally fifteen of the 50 busiest airports sit less than 30 feet above sea level, while the OECD identified 64 airports as likely to be affected by the predicted rise in sea levels. Complete disappearance of facilities may be remote (for the extreme risk, see our previous Lessons from the Venice Floods), but higher water levels will exacerbate the effects of storms, making airport flooding far more common and damaging. And though damage will be more extensive and long-lasting for coastal airports, inland airports will not be exempt from water-related adaptation issues. More intense rain events, another predicted effect of climate change, will cause more frequent and damaging river flooding, as the US Midwest has been experiencing. Inland airports are also frequently sited near rivers, for the same reasons that their coastal counterparts are frequently sited along the shore, increasing their vulnerability to flooding.

The obvious approach to adaptation for airports is to try to keep the water out. San Francisco is Exhibit A for this approach, having announced plans for a $587 million seawall to protect its airport. When the project was first tabled, in 2012, it was designed for an 11-inch sea level rise, with an estimated cost of $50 million. Seven years later, with climate projections getting worse, the revised plan now calls for planning on a 36-inch rise and has increased the estimated cost by 1,000%. Across the bay, Oakland plans a $46 million project to fortify and raise by 2 feet the 4.5-mile dike which protects it. In Hong Kong, plans for the $18 billion third airport runway were revised to include a 21-foot high seawall. Norway, whose state-run airport operator Avinor has called almost half its airports “quite exposed” to potential sea level rise, has decided to build all future runways at least 23 feet above sea level (For more, see this month’s article in Wired, How Airports are Protecting Themselves Against Rising Seas). Moving the water that does arrive is also critical: airport drainage systems will need significant fortifying to move greater and faster-arriving amounts of water. At some stage, however, airports will face the same dilemma that coastal cities and seaside home-owners increasingly face (see previous column, Capital Punishment): keep investing in barriers to the sea, or move. When city leaders opt to move, as in the case of Jakarta, it will be difficult for its airport to remain viable.

Adaptation needs: Heat. After water, the next biggest issue for airports will be extreme heat. The curbing of takeoffs due to 120-degree heat in Phoenix garnered many headlines (see the New York Times, Too Hot to Fly? Climate Change May Take a Toll on Air Travel). Hotter air means thinner air, impacting the ability of planes with smaller engines to generate enough lift to get airborne. Extreme heat requires longer distances to take off and/or reducing aircraft weight (with fewer passengers or cargo). Airports in locations where high temperatures already occur frequently, and with short runways that limit planes’ ability pick up speed, will be especially affected. One of Air India’s general managers, Captain Rajeev Bajpai, notes that extreme heat is already an aviation problem in countries like Kuwait, where planes can be grounded on summer days because their electronics automatically shut down. Hotter temperatures may cause tarmac to melt, or as in the case of Kangerlussuaq, may cause the ground under the tarmac to melt. While the impact of these issues may not rise to that caused by rising seas, takeoff and weight restrictions, and more frequent tarmac repairs, all add up to substantial costs for airport operators – as well as disruptions to passenger and cargo transport. Higher cooling costs will be another obvious effect.

There will be other climate adaptation needs. ICAO notes that high wind, heavy precipitation and even lightning strike events that threaten facilities, and aircraft are growing more frequent. But dealing with water and heat will be the big two for airports.

Financing Implications. Adapting to climate change will require greater capital spending from airports, accompanied by greater uncertainty and low likelihood of associated revenue gains. The airport industry is already today a major infrastructure investor. According to Reuters, $260 billion in airport infrastructure projects are under construction worldwide. Those are big numbers, and climate adaptation needs will add more, as we can see from the costs of just the San Francisco and Hong Kong plans. The handful of 30-million passenger per year airports will most easily finance and absorb these capital costs. Issues are likely, however, to arise for the larger number of mid-size airports around the world. The problem they will face is that the capital costs for keeping water out are related more to geography than the volume of an airport’s operations, and mid-size airports may face similar adaptation-related capital costs to those of larger airports, but without the same revenue base over which to amortize them. It will be an expensive asymmetry for many airports. The second financial implication of adaptation, greater uncertainty, is also illustrated by the case of San Francisco – where in seven years the projected capital needed to hold off rising waters rose by a factor of ten as projected sea rise levels kept changing. “It’s going to be an evolving battle,” as says Patti Clark, a former airport manager who now teaches at Embry-Riddle College of Aeronautics. Capital expenditures needed for continued operations in 2050 may well look very different in 2030 than it does in 2020. These kind of investments also have the disadvantage they will not in themselves produce incremental revenues – they will just try to keep the ship afloat, so to speak.

Houston Airport after Hurricane Harvey