Reconciling complexity and deep uncertainty in infrastructure design for climate adaptation

ABSTRACT

As climate change is emerging as a major challenge for man-made systems in the coming century, there has been significant effort to understand how to position infrastructure to adapt and deliver services reliably. Particularly, the climate is changing faster than the expected lifetime of critical infrastructure, resulting in situations well beyond the intended design conditions of a stationary climate. This study assesses how well existing infrastructure design approaches – traditional fail-safe, armoring, low regret, safe-to-fail, and adaptive management – account for climate-related complexity and uncertainty through an application of the Cynefin and Deep Uncertainty Frameworks. The results indicate that existing infrastructure design approaches have varying levels of validity for addressing climate change across spatial and temporal scales. The most common infrastructure design approaches undertake lower levels of complexity and uncertainty than climate change demands, indicating the potential of approaches that address complexity and deep uncertainty have not been fully realized.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• infrastructure
• deep uncertainty
• complexity
• adaptation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement 1444755, the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation (Award Nos. UREx SRN 1444755, GCR 1934933) and Office of Naval Research (Award No. N00014-18-1-2393).

Notes on contributors

Alysha M. Helmrich

Alysha M. Helmrich is a graduate student in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University and a fellow with the Urban Resilience to Extremes Research Sustainability Network. Her research interest broadly involves adapting urban infrastructure for climate change by integrating nature.

Mikhail V. Chester

Mikhail V. Chester is an associate professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. His research laboratory studies the resilience to climate change and sustainability of urban infrastructure systems. He and his team identify infrastructure vulnerabilities to climate hazards and work with cities and infrastructure agencies to identify and deploy adaptation strategies. More broadly he is interested in transitioning and designing infrastructure for the Anthropocene. He is co-leader of the National Science Foundation Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a consortium of roughly 120 researchers across 17 institutions in North and South America focused on developing novel strategies for preparing urban infrastructure for climate change.