Climate change already has far-reaching impacts on the oil industry, putting the operation, reliability, and growth of the sector at risk. Oil infrastructure has multi-decadal lifetime projections; thus, climate change and extreme weather events such as extreme temperatures, hurricanes, high winds, lightning strikes, storm surges, flooding, etc., pose an extra challenge to the oil supply chain, from upstream to downstream. In this paper, we review the climate change risk assessment frameworks, the impacts of climate change on oil infrastructure, and we identify gaps in the current knowledge, also suggesting future search directions on adapting the oil sector to climate change. The work overviews linkages between climate and oil industry design, operational, and service thresholds in a comprehensive hazard threshold matrix. Existing risk assessment methodologies that account for existing regulatory frameworks and interdependencies with other infrastructures are studied, leading to mitigation, adaptation, and sector resilience recommendations.

In the context of climate change and growing energy demand, solar technologies are considered promising solutions to mitigate Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and support sustainable adaptation. In Greece, solar power is the second major renewable energy, constituting an increasingly important component of the future low-carbon energy portfolio. In this work, we propose the use of a high-resolution regional climate model (Weather Research and Forecasting model, WRF) to generate a solar climate atlas for the near-term climatological future under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios. The model is set up with a 5 × 5 km² spatial resolution, forced by the ERA-INTERIM for the historic (1980–2004) period and by the EC-EARTH General Circulation Models (GCM) for the future (2020–2044). Results reaffirm the high quality of solar energy potential in Greece and highlight the ability of the WRF model to produce a highly reliable future climate solar atlas. Projected changes between the annual historic and future RCPs scenarios indicate changes of the annual Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) in the range of ±5.0%. Seasonal analysis of the GHI values indicates percentage changes in the range of ±12% for both scenarios, with winter exhibiting the highest seasonal increases in the order of 10%, and autumn the largest decreases. Clear-sky fraction f_clear projects increases in the range of ±4.0% in eastern and north continental Greece in the future, while most of the Greek marine areas might expect above 220 clear-sky days per year.

Wind technology is projected to play a key role in mitigating climate change effects and contributing to the reduction of CO₂ emissions, but its sustainability critically depends on current and future climate conditions. In this study, the climate change impacts on wind resources and wind energy potential in Greece are assessed, yielding a wealth of information that could be used by stakeholders. A detailed evaluation of future wind characteristics over Greece is carried out using EURO-CORDEX RCA4 model data with a horizontal resolution of ∼12 km, taking into consideration future RCP scenarios for the short term decadal climatology of 2040, which is the expected end-life of installed wind turbines. The RCA4 model demonstrated accurate performance when compared to actual observational data from the HNMS network, thus allowing higher confidence in assessments of future periods. Future projections revealed changes in the mean wind speed of the order of ±5% that did not vary significantly for the different RCP scenarios, although on a monthly basis that variability could reach ±20%. Decadal changes in the mean wind potential were of the order of ±15% for the two RCPs (2.6 and 8.5). Wind gusts exceeding 52 m/s, linked to the wind turbine structural integrity and robust performance, appeared more frequently in RCP 8.5 by about 2–4 times per decade, affecting mostly the South Ionian Sea. The findings also indicate a tendency for calming of the “Etesians” winds over the Aegean Sea in future summers.

This paper introduces a methodological approach for identifying the resilience of interconnected EU critical infrastructures to climate change. The proposed approach tries to establish a consequence-based modelling framework for assessing climate-dependent causal relationships between CI operation and response to climate impacts with an aim to minimise disruptions to service flows under diverse conditions. The proposed study provides a description of the virtual city’s forest fire and smoke reference scenario with their optional damages to the electricity transmission and distribution network.

The impacts of climate change are anticipated to become stronger in the future, leading to higher costs and more severe accidents in the oil industry’s facilities and surrounding communities. Motivated by this, the main objective of this paper is to develop, for the oil industry, a risk assessment methodology that considers future climate projections. In the context of an action research effort, carried out in a refinery in Greece, we adapted the organization’s extant risk management approach based on the Risk Assessment Matrix (RAM) and suggested a risk quantification process that incorporates future climate projections. The Climate Risk Assessment Matrix (CRAM) was developed to be used to assess the exposure of the facility’s assets, including human resources, to future climate risks. To evaluate CRAM, a comparison with RAM for the specific organization for the period 1980–2004 was made. Next, the application of CRAM for the period 2025–2049 indicated that, even though the resilience of the operations of the company to extreme conditions seems adequate at present, increased attention should be paid in the future to the resilience of refinery processes, the cooling system, and human resources. Beyond the specific case, the paper provides lessons for similar organizations and infrastructures located elsewhere.