Fail-safe and safe-to-fail adaptation: decision-making for urban flooding under climate change

Kim, Yeowon; Eisenberg, Daniel A.; Bondank, Emily; Chester, Mikhail; Mascaro, Giuseppe; Underwood, B. Shane

doi:10.1007/s10584-017-2090-1

Cited by 105 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…SETS approaches have also been recently applied (or proposed) for reducing the impacts of drought in California. Technologically oriented options being implemented or explored include desalination (such as the 50 million gallons per day Carlsbad Desal Plant near San Diego), groundwater drilling, and wastewater recycling (Cooley et al, 2014;Gorman, 2015;Howard & Millsap, 2014;Kang & Jackson, 2016;McKenzie, 2015;San Diego County Water Authority, 2018;Underwood, 2016). Ecologically based solutions include the use of more native vegetation in landscaping and the implementation of fog harvesting systems inspired by nature (California Water Service, 2018;FogNet, 2018;Goldstein, 2015;Knickmeyer, 2016;Weiss-penzias et al, 2016).…”

Section: Earth's Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These control efforts are highly techno‐centric in that they rely on the installation or upgrading of physical infrastructure components (e.g., pumps and culverts) as opposed to more ecologically based efforts like bioswales, constructed wetlands, or living shorelines that use vegetation or a mix of green and gray infrastructure to provide necessary services (Casal‐Campos et al, ; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [U.S. EPA], ; U.S. EPA, ; Wang et al, ). They also tend to emphasize strengthening and armoring infrastructure—an approach that fits best under the robustness regime of resilience, where traditional risk analysis is used to determine the acceptable likelihood and magnitude of an event to which infrastructure are expected to withstand (Kim et al, ; Park et al, ; Seager et al, ; Woods, ). For example, levees and stormwater management systems are often designed to withstand the impacts from a storm that has a magnitude equivalent to a 1% chance of occurring in any given year—also known as a 100‐year storm event.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Environmental Protection Agency [U.S. EPA], 2017a; U.S. EPA, 2017b; Wang et al, 2013). They also tend to emphasize strengthening and armoring infrastructure-an approach that fits best under the robustness regime of resilience, where traditional risk analysis is used to determine the acceptable likelihood and magnitude of an event to which infrastructure are expected to withstand (Kim et al, 2017;Park et al, 2013;Seager et al, 2017;Woods, 2015). For example, levees and stormwater management systems are often designed to withstand the impacts from a storm that has a magnitude equivalent to a 1% chance of occurring in any given year-also known as a 100-year storm event.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Interdependent Infrastructure as Linked Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETSs) to Address Lock‐in and Enhance Resilience

et al. 2018

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Traditional infrastructure adaptation to extreme weather events (and now climate change) has typically been techno‐centric and heavily grounded in robustness—the capacity to prevent or minimize disruptions via a risk‐based approach that emphasizes control, armoring, and strengthening (e.g., raising the height of levees). However, climate and nonclimate challenges facing infrastructure are not purely technological. Ecological and social systems also warrant consideration to manage issues of overconfidence, inflexibility, interdependence, and resource utilization—among others. As a result, techno‐centric adaptation strategies can result in unwanted tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and underaddressed vulnerabilities. Techno‐centric strategies that lock‐in today's infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and regulatory practices may be particularly problematic by exacerbating these ecological and social issues rather than ameliorating them. Given these challenges, we develop a conceptual model and infrastructure adaptation case studies to argue the following: (1) infrastructure systems are not simply technological and should be understood as complex and interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems (SETSs); (2) infrastructure challenges, like lock‐in, stem from SETS interactions that are often overlooked and underappreciated; (3) framing infrastructure with a SETS lens can help identify and prevent maladaptive issues like lock‐in; and (4) a SETS lens can also highlight effective infrastructure adaptation strategies that may not traditionally be considered. Ultimately, we find that treating infrastructure as SETS shows promise for increasing the adaptive capacity of infrastructure systems by highlighting how lock‐in and vulnerabilities evolve and how multidisciplinary strategies can be deployed to address these challenges by broadening the options for adaptation.

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Section: Earth's Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interdependent Infrastructure as Linked Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETSs) to Address Lock‐in and Enhance Resilience

et al. 2018

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“…However, there is often a gap when communicating resilience from research to practice (Aldunce et al, 2015;Chang et al, 2014;Meerow & Stults, 2016). Few studies explore decision frameworks that promote resilient infrastructure, and many of those that do suggest that resilient infrastructure development requires the consideration not only of biophysical but also social and institutional factors such as institutional capacity, spatial variability, social vulnerability, and level of serviceability of existing infrastructures (Chmutina et al, 2014;Francis & Bekera, 2014;Y. Kim, Eisenberg, et al, 2017;McDaniels et al, 2008;O'Brien et al, 2009).…”

Section: Resilient Infrastructure Development and Climate Change Adapmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Park et al, 2013), a safe-to-fail approach is becoming increasingly attractive to communities vulnerable to natural disasters and nonstationary climate risks (Y. Kim, Eisenberg, et al, 2017;Tye et al, 2015). We suggest that safe-to-fail infrastructure development practice aims to guide infrastructure investment and design for unpredicted risk scenarios and building adaptive capacity for affected communities.…”

Section: Resilient Infrastructure Development and Climate Change Adapmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Infrastructure Trolley Problem: Positioning Safe‐to‐fail Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation

et al. 2019

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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.

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The political complexity of coastal flood risk reduction: lessons for climate adaptation public works in the U.S.

Rasmussen

Oppenheimer²,

Kopp

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Climate adaptation public works (hereafter, adaptation works) are engineered, structural infrastructure projects, initiated, designed, and implemented by governments, with the intention of reducing the economic and social burden of climate change. For example, rising sea levels (Sweet et al., 2017), expanding coastal development (Crossett et al., 2013;Neumann et al., 2015;Titus et al., 2009), and recent hurricane disasters have encouraged several U.S. cities to investigate strategies for managing coastal floods, including adaptation works such as levees, storm surge barriers and other megastructures (

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Fail-safe and safe-to-fail adaptation: decision-making for urban flooding under climate change

Cited by 105 publications

References 42 publications

Interdependent Infrastructure as Linked Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETSs) to Address Lock‐in and Enhance Resilience

Interdependent Infrastructure as Linked Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETSs) to Address Lock‐in and Enhance Resilience

The Infrastructure Trolley Problem: Positioning Safe‐to‐fail Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation

The political complexity of coastal flood risk reduction: lessons for climate adaptation public works in the U.S.

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