ABSTRACT
Risk analysis techniques are useful tools to support decision-making for dam safety by optimizing the economic resources and pointing at the most efficient ways of reducing risks. Climate change is likely to modify dam risks in the future and must be incorporated to long-term safety management strategies to increase economic efficiencies when defining the implementation sequence of risk reduction measures. This article presents a set of guidelines and recommendations to integrate impacts on dam safety, which complexity must depend on the data availability and the depth of the analysis. Three methodologies have been applied to a Spanish dam subjected to the effects of a changing climate, with a focus on hydrological loads. It has been found that simplified methods give valuable information but can oversimplify the reality, while more complex methods provide finer results but at the expense of a higher computational cost. Risk analysis methodologies have proved useful to tackle inherent uncertainties from climate or hydrometeorological information, and to design mitigation measures to counteract the effects of climate change.
