The Great Civil Engineering Overhaul

Extreme weather events and climate conditions continue to worsen, products of a warming planet and consequences of our fossil fuel-based economy. Ready or not, civil engineering is about to get a major overhaul, one that will visit every aspect of this engineering discipline related to climate. Other engineering disciplines, chemical, mechanical, electrical, or any group that works in the built environment, are not exempt. The driver is global warming. Engineering standards and practices have not kept pace with changing climate conditions. Consequently, civil engineers face a serious dilemma and professional risk. Ethically and morally, civil engineers are responsible for protecting public health, safety, and welfare. For civil engineers and, for that matter, all engineers and scientists working in the built environment, the challenge of achieving net-zero carbon and adapting to changing climate conditions represents the opportunity of a lifetime.

Climate change has undermined a fundamental civil engineering assumption known as stationarity: past climate conditions are good predictors of future climate conditions. Civil infrastructure encompasses buildings, roads, schools, power plants, water treatment systems, waste disposal systems, communication systems, and more. A sound and working set of infrastructure assets and systems is essential for community growth and economic development. Climate-regulating ecological services, those natural services that maintain climate and weather conditions within known and manageable boundaries, are critical to civil infrastructure design. Therefore, it is essential to understand how these services work and what happens when they are pushed past their limits. Furthermore, when the assumption of stationarity is no longer reliable, civil engineers must modify designs to protect from, adapt to, or accommodate the changing climate conditions.

This chapter explores the relationships between the Earth’s natural capital, climate change, sustainability, and human society. The assumption of stationarity is one of the key foundations of civil engineering. It enables engineers to design and deliver robust, resilient, reliable, and long-lived civil works projects using historical climate conditions to estimate future climate conditions. Climate regulation is just one of the Earth’s natural ecosystem resources and services from which society benefits. Since 1990, the United Nations Development Program has published the Human Development Index (HDI), a rough measure of the economic development and well-being of the world’s nations. The HDI is a combination of three factors: life expectancy, knowledge and education, and income. The ecological footprint is the natural resources and service productivity demanded by society across these productivity categories: built-up land, cropland, fishing grounds, forest products, grazing land, and carbon absorption (forests).

This chapter considers the consequences of unsustainable development, most notably the degradation of climate-regulating systems and the impact on human well-being. Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a general increase in human development across all nations, some increasing more rapidly than others. Natural capital withdrawals to meet society’s demands for goods and services have outstripped efforts to conserve, preserve, or restore these resources and systems. A useful way of illustrating the consequences of using fossil fuels is to show it in relation to natural capital and human well-being. Shifting to a low-carbon economy will drive massive changes in infrastructure systems in terms of the resources and energy that are used, how they are operated and maintained, and how they will be adapted to changing climate conditions. Knowledge of infrastructure asset performance under extreme conditions is sparse, mostly buried in disaster damage and recovery reports.

Designing new or refurbishing existing infrastructure will involve mitigation and adaptation: mitigation to address the causes of a changing climate and adaptation to address the consequences. Given the multiple climate change-related disasters the world has experienced and predictions of more, it is more than reasonable to expect multiple national and international efforts to preserve the infrastructure investments that support national and global economies. Nevertheless, this chapter details what the response to climate change needs to be. Mitigation should focus on greenhouse gas emissions reduction, with a target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Adaptation must cover new and existing infrastructure assets, adding robustness and resilience across the board while changing out fossil energy sources for low- or no-carbon sources. The chapter also covers “Plan B” last resort engineering of the planet to reduce solar radiation input and remove greenhouse gases from the air.

Many future climate conditions fall into a problem category mathematicians call deep uncertainty: super-wicked problems in which engineers can only bracket possible future conditions. This chapter discusses five approaches for handling conditions of deep uncertainty in infrastructure planning, design, and operation. These include robust decision-making, dynamic adaptive planning, dynamic adaptive policy pathways, info-gap decision theory, and engineering options analysis. Decisionmakers determine policies (in the case of infrastructure projects, performance requirements, and specifications) designed to influence the behavior of a system (infrastructure asset with physical and operational aspects) to achieve the outcomes of interest to the stakeholders. Those outcomes become criteria relevant to the decisionmakers and are weighted according to stakeholder preferences. Decisionmakers translate stakeholder goals, objectives, and preferences into the infrastructure asset requirements and specifications for producing the desired outcomes, which are translated into infrastructure asset performance criteria.

This chapter presents a modified version of Dynamic Adaptive Planning (DAP), a methodology for handling changing climate conditions and other uncertainties in infrastructure project delivery. It provides details for planning, delivering, and operating infrastructure projects that are climate resilient and contribute to conditions of sustainability. A standard project management tool is a risk register, a way to identify potential risks and devise plans to deal with them should they become real. Similarly, the dangers posed by a changing climate can be identified, along with strategies and actions to be taken when significant changes occur. The Robustness Matrix is designed to identify deviations from project success across the project life cycle. Project managers using this tool can develop strategies and actions for all life cycle phases: planning, project delivery, and operation.

While Dynamic Adaptive Planning (DAP) was project specific (i.e., defending an infrastructure asset against multiple hazards and exposures, including climate), Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) seeks to reduce a limited set of hazards and exposures in a specified area, such as a city, region, or watershed balanced against defined objectives. Using DAPP, decisionmakers can change course based on new knowledge or unexpected events. This chapter presents a modified version of DAPP. To handle changing conditions in a specified geographic area, multiple approaches (pathways) are generally available. DAPP organizes the pathways into a sensible order, starting with the most cost-effective approach for the given condition and leaving the most flexibility for change based on unforeseen events or new knowledge acquired over time. Alternative approaches (pathways) for adapting to stressors are presented in sequence based on their range of effectiveness.

This chapter describes global efforts to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. The twenty-first Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP 21) seems to be a turning point in this era of climate change. The Paris Agreement, a product of COP 21, requires national commitments to reduce carbon emissions, reaching net zero by 2050. UN Special Envoy on Climate Finance Mark Carney identified another climate-related tragedy: self-interest diverting attention away from future financial instability. Although future climate conditions are uncertain, what is certain is that following accepted standards and practices where climate-related hazards are involved can create risks to public health, safety, and welfare. Investments in US infrastructure funded by recent legislation set resilience as the basis for awards. Approaches for handling climate uncertainties in civil infrastructure design and operation are available and being applied.