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

Abstract

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.

Application of Sustainable Prefabricated Wall Technology for Energy Efficient Social Housing

“…The need for the cities to be smart, sustainable, green, and low carbon has increased the opportunities for sustainable urban growth [15]. Sustainable infrastructure that can be adaptable to different climatic conditions is being considered for the long-term per-spective [16,17]. Maintaining environmental sustainability in the cities that have rapid population growth is considered as one of the major challenges [18].…”

A Framework for Resilient Urban Futures

“…UREx SRN researchers have advanced the concept of safe-to-fail infrastructure (Ahern 2011;Kim et al 2017Kim et al , 2019, which may incorporate natural elements but principally is a new way of thinking about infrastructure under uncertain and changing probabilities of extreme events. In this framing, instead of being designed to withstand events of a certain magnitude, infrastructure systems are conceived as flexible, multifunctional, and able to adapt or transform through the interactions of S, E, and T. In fact, these interactions are key to thinking about the future and ways to manage for or enhance resilience to increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme events under the SETS framework.…”

Using Biomimicry to Support Resilient Infrastructure Design

“…These core concepts advocate for the ability of infrastructure to sense changes in stresses, shocks, and uncertainties related to the function and demands of the system. At times, infrastructure managers will need to learn from and manage failures, which can be seen in practice through safe‐to‐fail design (Ahern, 2011; Kim et al, 2019). In natural systems, failure is managed by natural selection against strategies that do not work and successful mistakes arising from mutation.…”

“…These proxies are then used to determine an acceptable level of risk (frequency and magnitude) for fail-safe design approaches (Ayyub, 2018;Lopez-Cantu & Samaras, 2018;Markolf et al, 2018). Stationarity has traditionally allowed for a reliable and practical approach for assessing future conditions, and uncertainty analysis can be added to account for inherent model vulnerabilities (Kim et al, 2019). Until the second half of last century, such stationary conditions allowed the dominant risk-based paradigm for design to persist and provide solutions that met societal needs (Chester et al, 2020).…”