Practice
Assessment of vulnerability and detailed risk analysis
Aspect contributions
How this practice contributes to the green port aspects.
| Aspect | Role | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Climate Adaptation | Core | - |
| Regulatory Compliance | Secondary | - |
| Certification and Benchmarking | Secondary | - |
| Risk Management | Secondary | - |
| Financing (Green & Sustainable) | Secondary | - |
| Development Planning | Secondary | - |
| Engineering Design | Secondary | - |
| Materials Selection | Secondary | - |
| Maintenance | Secondary | - |
| Social Licence and Community Engagement | Secondary | - |
Summary
Understanding climate risks and building resilience through robust analysis and climate stress-testing methodologies provides a critical foundation for informed decision making. These approaches support the development of risk and opportunity registers, performance criteria, and metrics that enable effective prioritization and action. To avoid maladaptation and enhance preparedness, a comprehensive understanding of climate risks in all their dimensions is essential, although this remains challenging. Climate impacts vary significantly depending on physical settings, climate drivers, local conditions, and the availability of redundancies.
High-quality, facility-level technical risk assessments, grounded in the best available science, are therefore urgently needed. Existing assessments undertaken by ports worldwide demonstrate how scientific evidence can inform practical adaptation and provide valuable lessons for replication. Such risk assessments enable the identification of impact likelihood and severity, as well as the urgency of adaptation responses, defined as the ratio of the time required to implement effective measures to the time available. (Adapted from Asariotis et al., 2024.)
This information is vital to support operational decision-making, resource allocation, and the design of targeted adaptation measures. A range of methodological frameworks is available to assist ports in this process, including cross-sectoral climate risk tools, region-specific port adaptation frameworks, and technical assistance initiatives tailored to vulnerable regions. In addition, resilience tools such as port resilience indices and self-assessment instruments have been developed to evaluate operational preparedness, promote stakeholder engagement, and translate preparedness planning into actionable resilience outcomes.
Details
Understanding climate risks and resilience, through analysis and climate stress testing methodologies to develop risk and opportunity register creation, performance criteria and metrics, provides a base of risk understanding from which decisions can be made.
Moreover, to avoid maladaptation and increase levels of preparedness on the ground, a good understanding of relevant risks, in all its dimensions, is critical. This, however, constitutes a major challenge. The potential adverse impacts of climate variability and change may be wide-ranging, but they vary considerably by physical setting, climate forcing and a range of other factors, including local conditions and the availability of redundancies (Asariotis et al., 2024).
Technical risk assessments at local/facility levels, using best available science are therefore urgently required Asariotis et al., 2024). Several examples of relevant assessments carried out by ports worldwide (see the compilation in UNCTAD 2020; Monioudi et al. 2018) may provide useful insights and inspiration to others.
On the basis of such risk assessments, the probability and severity of impacts can be determined, together with the urgency of the adaptation responses, which can be defined as the ratio of the time needed to plan/implement an effective response to the time available (Lenton et al. 2019). Relevant information is needed to support on-the-ground decision-making, inform the prioritization of resources and the design of the required adaptation measures (Asariotis et al., 2024).
Methodological frameworks to assist in risk assessment and adaptation planning for ports include some which are cross-sectoral (e.g. Smithers and Dworak 2023) as well as those developed under the EU INTERREG ECCLIPSE project (ECCLIPSE 2021), focusing on ports of South-west Europe, including Valencia, Bordeaux and Aveiro.
Worth highlighting in this context are also efforts to develop port resilience-related tools and indices to help address climate change impacts, such as for instance:
- a ports resilience index (PRI) that takes into account all stakeholders associated with sea ports to determine the level of operational resilience of port processes in the face of climate change (León-Mateos et al. 2021);
- a self-assessment tool developed for port and marine industry leaders to assess their preparedness to maintain operations during and after disasters (Morris and Sempier 2016);
- a PRI developed through a participatory approach to engage port stakeholders beyond written preparedness plans toward action (Morris and Sempier 2019).
Prabawardani et al. (2024) provide a good example of a climate change risk assessment for the Tanjung Emas Port, Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The study followed a step-by-step descriptive methodology to evaluate the readiness of the port to address the impacts of climate change.
- -A desk-based data collection stage was undertaken using data covering port infrastructure, facilities, and operational conditions and provided a baseline understanding of the port’s physical and institutional setting.
- -Second, a stakeholder engagement step was implemented through a single Focus Group Discussion including representatives from regulation and policy, climate and meteorological information, port operations and scientific expertise.
- -Third, direct field observations were conducted to validate secondary data and stakeholder input.
- -Fourth, a systematic literature review was carried out.
Together, these sequential steps integrated empirical observation, stakeholder knowledge, and existing research to assess climate risks and port readiness.
How risks change over time, according to climate change is also prudent to include within a risk assessment. An example below is from Port of London Authority’s Climate Change Adaptation Report (Port of London Authority, 2024), which shows how risk increases (or stays the same) with future climate change scenarios.
Enabling factors
Climate adaptation can be strongly assisted through laws and regulations, such as those that, in some jurisdictions, require climate risk assessment, disclosure and resilience planning. National strategies in particular, such as National Adaptation Plans, as well as sector strategies and institutional frameworks can also assist greatly. Clear national policy signals that translate international commitments into sector-specific expectations for ports are a key enabler: where a national adaptation plan, a port sector master plan, or a sovereign climate commitment provides a credible trajectory, port authorities, operators, and financiers align more readily. The policy environment (laws, regulations, strategies, institutional frameworks) within climate change understanding and climate change planning is a rapidly developing landscape. Of particular note are the requirements for ports to undertake reporting and inherent as an incentive is to reduce risk to the ports itself, assisting with planning and avoiding costs. Ring-fenced green finance windows, including concessional capital from multilateral development banks and the ADB-managed ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility (ACGF), are a critical enabler for first-of-kind investment. Integration of port-relevant activities into the ASEAN Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance provides a further enabler by giving lenders and issuers a shared reference.
Climate adaptation can be assisted through guidelines and improved standards. Further, the expectations of standards in climate adaptation planning varies greatly, therefore standardization of standards is an enabler. Regional knowledge exchange has emerged as an enabler in its own right. DMC ports benefit from structured opportunities to learn from peers in comparable operating and regulatory environments, alongside examples from other regions. Anchor ports that publish transparent sustainability disclosures and host peer delegations play a catalytic role for surrounding ports in their national and sub-regional contexts. Structured ADB technical assistance, particularly for project preparation, gap analysis, and governance strengthening, can help ports convert ambition into investment-ready projects.
Sustainable procurement enables climate-resilient port development by embedding environmental, social and governance considerations into investment, design, construction and operational decisions. Through lifecycle-based purchasing, climate-risk criteria, supplier accountability and resilience standards, procurement helps ensure infrastructure is adaptable, durable and aligned with long-term sustainability objectives, reducing climate vulnerabilities while supporting responsible economic development and supply chain resilience.
Finally, partnerships with shipping lines, cargo owners, tenants, and energy utilities are recurring enablers; no port advances its green agenda successfully in isolation from its value chain. Some climate adaptation measures in particular are heavily reliant on partnerships and collaboration, including those requiring additional land, share land uses and nature-based adaptation.