The Economic Impact of Critical National Infrastructure Failure Due to Space Weather

TL;DR

This paper reviews the socio-economic impacts of space weather on critical infrastructure, highlighting the challenges in assessing risks and summarizing historical and potential future economic damages from space weather events.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the development of economic impact assessments of space weather from 1989 to 2017 and suggests future research directions.

Findings

Space weather can significantly disrupt critical infrastructure.

Economic damages from space weather range from millions to billions of dollars.

Assessment of space weather impacts is hampered by limited data and consensus.

Abstract

Space weather is a collective term for different solar or space phenomena that can detrimentally affect technology. However, current understanding of space weather hazards is still relatively embryonic in comparison to terrestrial natural hazards such as hurricanes or earthquakes. Indeed, certain types of space weather such as large Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are an archetypal example of a low probability, high severity hazard. Few major events, short time-series data and a lack of consensus regarding the potential impacts on critical infrastructure have hampered the economic impact assessment of space weather. Yet, space weather has the potential to disrupt a wide range of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) systems including electricity transmission, satellite communications and positioning, aviation and rail transportation. Recently there has been growing interest in these potential economic and societal impacts. Estimates range from millions of dollars of equipment damage from the Quebec 1989 event, to some analysts reporting billions of lost dollars in the wider economy from potential future disaster scenarios. Hence, this provides motivation for this article which tracks the origin and development of the socio-economic evaluation of space weather, from 1989 to 2017, and articulates future research directions for the field.