Adapting Infrastructure Practices to Climate Change

The climate science community informs us that extremes of climate and weather are changing from historical values and that the changes are driven substantially by emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Civil infrastructure systems traditionally have been designed, constructed, operated, and maintained for appropriate probabilities of functionality, durability, and safety while exposed to climate and weather extremes during their full service lives. Because of uncertainties in future greenhouse gas emissions and in the models for future climate and weather extremes, neither the climate science community nor the engineering community presently can define the statistics of future climate and weather extremes. This paper describes the knowledge available to the civil engineering community, suggests practical approaches for dealing with these uncertainties for current projects, and recommends cooperative research with the climate and social science communities to obtain improved bases for future civil engineering standards and practices.