Investigating the Impacts of Disruption on Interdependent Critical Infrastructure across the Food, Energy, Water, Nexus

Abstract:

Critical infrastructure organizes much of modern life and enables people to meet their basic needs. Interlinkages across the food, water, and energy (FEW) resources are intrinsically linked to other infrastructures such as the transportation sector throughout our global economy. The transportation sector is particularly essential because disruptions to transportation infrastructure vary widely and could impact the provisioning of all three FEW sectors. Through this research, we investigate how disruptions in transportation infrastructure in the Mid-Atlantic US could impact FEW flows by modeling theoretical disruptions in several transportation modes that are available for the movement of commodities using a modified Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) database coupled with various trade and economic data. Transportation modes such as include rail, truck, air, water, pipeline, and other modes are all susceptible to various disruptions. These disruptions likely have differing impacts depending on the commodity being transported and the location. We hypothesize that disruptions in transportation infrastructure will cause inequitable impacts on various FEW flows such that particular locations or populations will be impacted disproportionally in the receipt of goods.