Past and Present Design Practices and Uncertainty in Climate Projections are Challenges for Designing Infrastructure to Future Conditions

Abstract

Designing infrastructure for a changing climate remains a major challenge for engineers. In popular discourse a narrative has emerged that infrastructures are likely undersigned for the future. Weather-related hazards are directly embedded in the infrastructure design process. Yet the codes and standards that engineers use for this risk analysis have been changing for decades, sometimes increasing and other times decreasing design values. Further complicating the issue is that climate projections show increasing or decreasing intensities depending on the hazard and region. Thus, it is not clear that infrastructure is universally underdesigned. Here, analyses are developed at both regional and national scales using precipitation and roadway drainage systems to answer this question. First, it is shown that modeling uncertainty can pose challenges for using future projections to update regionspecific standards. Second, the results show that depending on the historical design conditions and the direction of projections, roadway drainage infrastructure may be designed

The centrality of engineering codes and risk-based design standards in climate adaptation strategies

“…The suite of periodic IPCC reports, beginning in 1990 through 2021 created a climate model, scenario-driven 'top-down' analytical paradigm. This was deemed by many engineering practitioners as unsuitable for most water resources management problemsparticularly those related to site-specific infrastructure design (Kundzewicz & Stakhiv, 2010;Stakhiv, 2011;Retief et al, 2013;Sykora et al, 2017;Sykora et al, 2018;Underwood et al, 2020).…”

“…A segment of the engineering profession suggests that traditional risk-based design methods may currently be more useful than non-stationary approaches because it is much too difficult to realistically accommodate all the uncertainties associated with climate change. In fact, many authors argue that factoring in these uncertainties, many of them 'unknown unknowns', simply makes the analyses more complex and bewildering for the public and political decision-makers (Serinaldi & Kilsby, 2015;Underwood et al, 2020).…”

Framing the Use of Climate Model Projections in Infrastructure Engineering: Practices, Uncertainties, and Recommendations

“…Additionally, assessing the different possible outcomes in applying GCM projections with respect to using different data sets and data-processing techniques is important. The uncertainties of applying climate model projections in engineering applications are not well understood (Douglas et al 2017), and these uncertainties can be challenging when it comes to updating engineering designs (Underwood et al 2020). It is worth noting that the methodologies for applying climate model projections and evaluating related uncertainty are a rich topic in the climate science literature (e.g., Hawkins and Sutton 2016;Jack and Katragkou 2019;Maraun 2016).…”

Navigating Exploitative and Explorative Leadership in Support of Infrastructure Resilience

“…The tensions between exploitation (i.e., efficiency within the status quo) and exploration (i.e., pursuing innovations and associated risks) of these technological organizations parallel tensions experienced by infrastructure managers navigating efficiency and adaptation for resilience (March, 1991;Papachroni et al, 2016). The consequences of designing infrastructure systems for efficiency are becoming increasingly evident with failures across a range of disturbances even beyond climate change (Chester et al, 2020b;Underwood et al, 2020), such as aging infrastructure and emerging technology (Arbesman, 2017;Chester and Allenby, 2018), terrorist attacks, cyber warfare (Ogie, 2017;Paté-Cornell et al, 2018), and pandemics (Carvalhaes et al, 2020).…”