Civil Infrastructure and Deep Uncertainty

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.