A review of emerging strategies for incorporating climate change considerations into infrastructure planning, design, and decision making

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ABSTRACT

Climate change is affecting infrastructure in complex and uncertain ways. Traditional load factors, safety factors, and design standards appear misaligned with current and anticipated future conditions. Thus, adapting infrastructure for a changing climate will likely necessitate balancing trade-offs between new and old design paradigms. This literature review summarizes advances in the implementation and research of resilient infrastructure within the context of climate change. We identified three categories of adaptation strategies: (1) assessments and frameworks to incorporate climate data and risks into infrastructure design and planning, (2) modelling of decision making under uncertainty and policy analysis, and (3) examples of best practices, case studies, and workarounds to enhance resilience. This work highlights advances in infrastructure decision making under uncertainty and ways to instill resilience into infrastructure systems. It is expected to help form a knowledge basis for transitioning to infrastructure planning, design, and implementation that is congruous with a changing world.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• climate change adaptation
• decision making
• resilience assessment

Disclosure statement

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) reviewed the anonymised abstract of the article, but had no role in the peer review process nor the final editorial decision.

Additional information

Funding

The Article Publishing Charge (APC) for this article is funded by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI).

Notes on contributors

Marie Buhl

Marie Buhl is a PhD student in the Environmental Systems program at UC Merced. She is a German Diplom-Ingenieurin in Civil Engineering specialized in hydraulic engineering and has worked as a consulting engineer before coming to UC Merced. Her research interests include how climate change is impacting the planning and design process for infrastructure, especially water infrastructure. Having witnessed the struggle of engineers to adapt the infrastructure process to new conditions within the framework of existing standards, she wants to help develop strategies and toolkits that help local stakeholders respond to disasters and strengthen their infrastructure.

S. Markolf

Dr. Samuel (Sam) Markolf is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Merced. Prior to joining UC-Merced, Sam was a Research Fellow on the NSF-sponsored Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at Arizona State University. Broadly, his research applies systems thinking to sustainability and resilience challenges facing cities and infrastructure systems. Example projects include exploring the incorporation of climate projections into infrastructure design processes, examining impacts and responses to extreme events (e.g., flood, extreme heat) within transportation systems, and analyzing the extent to which interconnected social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) can enhance (or hinder) the resilience of cities and infrastructure systems. Ultimately, his aim is to help decision-makers become more adept at identifying, anticipating, alleviating, and responding to accelerating climatic, technological, and social change.

Sam holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, M.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and a joint-Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.