Adaptive Infrastructure To Mitigate Future Climate Risk: Building Upon Our Geotechnical Engineering Heritage

It’s time to recognize that past extreme events may no longer serve as reliable proxies for the future. Current infrastructure design concepts rely on historical events, assuming temporal stationarity (i.e., statistics of past extremes do not change significantly over time). However, global warming and land use change have increased the risk of extreme events, including floods, ocean water levels, drought, extreme precipitation, and the associated damage to critical infrastructure, such as dams, highways, and storm water and sewer systems. Experts have observed an increasing trend in severity and frequency of extreme events, which introduces a new level of uncertainty that should be included when planning, designing, and operating infrastructure systems.