Integrating Infrastructure-Relevant Climate Projections into City Planning: Learning from Boulder CO, Austin TX and Washington DC

Abstract:

Over the coming century, climate change has the potential to impact infrastructure in many different ways, particularly in population-dense areas that depend on transportation and built environments. Many of these impacts may occur via changes in the frequency and magnitude of extremes: high and low temperature, heat waves, precipitation, coastal flooding, and storm events.

Having a better idea of how the climate might change locally, both within the near future as well as toward the end of the century, can give city planners and engineers guidance when designing new structures and when repairing and fortifying existing components of buildings, bridges, highways, sewers, ports, etc. However, the type of event and the amount of damages that may be incurred are often highly specific to a given location.

Over the last 10 years, we have worked with a broad range of cities, states, non-profit organizations, and federal agencies to integrate climate projections into ongoing resiliency, sustainability, and management processes. Drawing on that experience, we describe the broad steps in assimilating climate information into existing decision-making frameworks relevant to most applications, as well as highlighting many of the unique aspects of these analyses using examples from our most recent work with three very different cities – Austin TX, Boulder CO and Washington DC. From initial conversations with local experts to identify relevant thresholds to final integration of projected changes into the planning processes of these cities, these case studies highlight the utility of including future climate projections into infrastructure planning, the challenges to doing so, and the over-arching importance of communication and interaction between infrastructure experts, engineers, and scientists.