The Climate is Changing Fast. Infrastructure Should Too
Date Posted: July 13, 2021
Posted In: Discussion,
From Fast Company: Extreme weather events reveal, with unsettling frequency, just how precarious our urban infrastructure is. In Portland, a recent heat wave made the city so hot that wiring on its streetcar system melted, bringing lines to a halt. In Texas, atypically cold winter storms in February overwhelmed the power grid and left millions without heat. The big infrastructure systems that undergird our daily lives and provide literally life-giving services like warmth, shelter and water can suddenly turn unreliable.
Part of the problem is how that infrastructure was designed, according to Mikhail Chester, an associate professor of civil engineering at Arizona State University. “You’ve got this slow moving, what we call obdurate infrastructure, stubbornly refusing to change, ossified, locked in. There’s lots of good words for it,” Chester says. “Climate is changing faster than infrastructure can respond. That’s the crux of the problem.”
Chester argues that the world needs more adaptive infrastructure — systems and physical elements that are designed to adapt to changing conditions, be they extreme weather events or just the gradual shifts in heat, cold, wetness, and dryness that climate change brings about.
He’s one of the co-leads of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a massive 500-person project funded by the National Science Foundation and focused on identifying new strategies for dealing with climate change in 10 cities in the United States and Latin America, and then working with those cities to implement them. One of the key takeaways from the network’s efforts over the past six years is that the standard practices for designing and building infrastructure are often steeped in developing hard solutions to problems based on more stable conditions in the past. When extreme events cause things to break, Chester says, too often the response is to repair and rebuild, not rethink.
“Engineers know how to do this. We’ve been trained for 100 years in how to do this,” Chester says. “The challenge that we often think about from there is, well, there’s only so much of that armoring, strengthening, hardening you can do.”