As climate change is emerging as a major challenge for man-made systems in the coming century, there has been significant effort to understand how to position infrastructure to adapt and deliver services reliably. Particularly, the climate is changing faster than the expected lifetime of critical infrastructure, resulting in situations well beyond the intended design conditions of a stationary climate. This study assesses how well existing infrastructure design approaches – traditional fail-safe, armoring, low regret, safe-to-fail, and adaptive management – account for climate-related complexity and uncertainty through an application of the Cynefin and Deep Uncertainty Frameworks. The results indicate that existing infrastructure design approaches have varying levels of validity for addressing climate change across spatial and temporal scales. The most common infrastructure design approaches undertake lower levels of complexity and uncertainty than climate change demands, indicating the potential of approaches that address complexity and deep uncertainty have not been fully realized.
KEYWORDS: Climate change, infrastructure, deep uncertainty, complexity, adaptation
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The Infrastructure Trolley Problem: Positioning Safe‐to‐fail Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation
Motivated by the need for cities to prepare for and adapt to climate change, we advance the paradigm of safe‐to‐fail by focusing on the decision dilemmas and the consideration of infrastructure failure consequences in developing infrastructure. Infrastructures are largely designed as fail‐safe; that is, they are not intended to fail, and when failure happens, the consequences are severe. Safe‐to‐fail has been recently presented as the antithesis of fail‐safe, without any specific guidance of what the paradigm is or how to apply it. There is an emerging need for stakeholders, including policy makers, planners, engineers, utilities, and communities to understand infrastructure failures, bring their knowledge into the infrastructure development process, and help adapt cities to unpredictable and changing climate risks. We frame safe‐to‐fail as an infrastructure development paradigm that internalizes the consequences of infrastructure failure in the development process. This framing of safe‐to‐fail further reveals an emerging “infrastructure trolley problem” where the adaptive capacity of some regions is improved at the expense of others. We demonstrate practical dilemmas in developing infrastructure under nonstationary climate and guide managing trade‐offs in the prioritization of different consequences of infrastructure failure.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10455457
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Earth's Future
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2328-4277
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 704-717
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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