Global Vulnerability Assessment of Mobile Telecommunications Infrastructure to Climate Hazards using Crowdsourced Open Data

The ongoing change in Earth`s climate is causing an increase in the frequency and severity of climate-related hazards, for example, from coastal flooding, riverine flooding, and tropical cyclones. There is currently an urgent need to quantify the potential impacts of these events on infrastructure and users, especially for hitherto neglected infrastructure sectors, such as telecommunications, particularly given increasing dependence on digital technologies. In this analysis a global assessment is undertaken, quantifying the number of mobile base stations potentially vulnerable to climate hazards using open crowdsourced data equating to 6 million 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G base stations. We find that for a 0.1% annual probability event under a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5), the number of potentially affected base stations is estimated at 1.61 million for tropical cyclones, equating to USD 1.62 billion in direct damage (an increase against the historical baseline of 20% and 11%, respectively). For coastal flooding the number of potentially affected mobile base stations for an event with a 0.1% annual probability under RCP8.5 is 92.2 thousand, equating to direct damage costs of USD 2.26 billion (an increase against the baseline of 75% and 85%, respectively). The findings demonstrate the need for risk analysts to include mobile communications (and telecommunications more broadly) in future critical national infrastructure assessments. Indeed, this paper contributes an assessment methodology and dataset for use in future research to assess this critical infrastructure sector using open data.