Climate-Resilient Infrastructure

Prepared by the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate of ASCE.

Civil infrastructure systems traditionally have been designed for appropriate functionality, durability, and safety for climate and weather extremes during their full-service lives; however, climate scientists inform us that the extremes of climate and weather have altered from historical values in ways difficult to predict or project. Climate-Resilient Infrastructure: Adaptive Design and Risk Management, MOP 140, provides guidance for and contributes to the developing or enhancing of methods for infrastructure analysis and design in a world in which risk profiles are changing and can be projected with varying degrees of uncertainty requiring a new design philosophy to meet this challenge.

The underlying approaches in this manual of practice (MOP) are based on probabilistic methods for quantitative risk analysis, and the design framework provided focuses on identifying and analyzing low-regret, adaptive strategies to make a project more resilient.

Beginning with an overview of the driving forces and hazards associated with a changing climate, subsequent chapters in MOP 140 provide observational methods, illustrative examples, and case studies; estimation of extreme events particularly related to precipitation with guidance on monitoring and measuring methods; flood design criteria and the development of project design flood elevations; computational methods of determining flood loads; adaptive design and adaptive risk management in the context of life-cycle engineering and economics; and climate resilience technologies.

MOP 140 will be of interest to engineers, researchers, planners, and other stakeholders charged with adaptive design decisions to achieve infrastructure resilience targets while minimizing life-cycle costs in a changing climate.