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Climate and other scenarios disrupt priorities in several management perspectives

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Abstract

Climate vulnerability and adaptation assessments are increasingly typical of infrastructure agencies. In contrast to global emissions reductions, adaptation decision making tends to occur on smaller geographic scales and nearer time horizons. The supporting analyses are performed by local agencies with relatively sparse data and few resources. Recent efforts of the authors introduced scenario-based preferences to perform risk analysis for these agencies in a single perspective, updating management priorities when climate and non-climate stressors combine. On the other hand, a single perspective fails to account for the complexities of infrastructures, organizations, and stakeholders. Several perspectives should include asset management, project selection, policy-making, demography/geography, research and development, and others. This paper develops a framework to address several management perspectives, finding the implications of climate and other conditions to update agency priorities. The framework is demonstrated for a twenty-year transportation plan with approximately 600 square miles in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. The demonstration includes that a scenario of climate combined with increased travel demand is relatively more influential across several perspectives, when considering climate both alone and in combination with each of economic recession, wear and tear, and ecosystem stressors.

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Notes

  1. The heat index (HI) is an index that combines air temperature and relative humidity in an attempt to determine the human-perceived equivalent temperature. For example, when the temperature is 32 °C with very high humidity, the heat index can be about 41 °C.

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Acknowledgments

This case study was funded in part by the US Federal Highway Administration, climate change vulnerability, and risk assessment project (Project No. 136780). The authors are grateful to the support of Benjamin McFarlane and others of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission (HRPDC), the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRTPO), the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), and the Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation and Research (VCTIR). The authors give special thanks to Dr. Christopher J. Karvetski for consulting on the methodology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Haowen You & Elizabeth B. Connelly

  2. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    James H. Lambert

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Andres F. Clarens

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  1. Haowen You
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  2. Elizabeth B. Connelly
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  4. Andres F. Clarens
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Correspondence to Elizabeth B. Connelly.

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You, H., Connelly, E.B., Lambert, J.H. et al. Climate and other scenarios disrupt priorities in several management perspectives. Environ Syst Decis 34, 540–554 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-014-9525-2

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