Maximizing Joint Economic and Ecological Robustness in Floodplain Planning

Life cycle management of natural infrastructure: assessment of state of practice and current tools

“…Although conventional infrastructure is faced with environmental processes that deteriorate it, hardened structures are assumed to react more predictably, and engineers are more comfortable with the level of uncertainty in performance, largely due to their familiarity with degradation to conventional infrastructure, whereas assumptions about the evolution of NI do not exist. Conventional structures are not necessarily more robust than NI simply because they are static (robustness may be considered as retaining an acceptable level of performance over a designated range of uncertainty; Spence et al, 2015). Conventional assessments assume that environmental conditions (i.e., hydrologic, climactic) are stationary, but this assumption has been debated for over a decade (Milly et al, 2008;Brown, 2010;Montanari and Koutsoyiannis, 2014).…”

“…Deciding how to value non-market goods, like biodiversity, has long been problematic (Costanza et al, 1997;Wilson and Carpenter, 1999;Ruckelshaus et al, 2015) and the range of potential ES metrics available has resulted in diverse methodologies and applications that can be difficult to synthesize (Polasky et al, 2015;Hanna et al, 2017). Yet, focusing on the monetary value of a social or ecological metric is not always necessary for effective decision-making (Ruckelshaus et al, 2015) or can be avoided by treating non-market metrics as constraints or trade-offs in multi-objective optimization models (Poff et al, 2015;Grimm and Lund, 2016) or other multi-criteria methods. The diversity of metrics available to quantify ES is not necessarily detrimental either, as context-dependencies and regional constraints will certainly call for different metrics to measure success in different regions.…”