CRISP Type 2: Collaborative Research: Multi-scale Infrastructure Interactions with Intermittent Disruptions: Coastal Flood Protection, Transportation and Governance Networks

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Infrastructure networks in coastal communities must anticipate and respond to the emerging threat of coastal inundation due to sea level rise, tidal forcing, wind events and precipitation. As inundation events become both more frequent and more severe, human activities and services are disrupted, including transportation, recreation and economic activities. In many of these communities, decision making about protective infrastructure and transportation planning is highly dispersed and variable, including local property owners, individual communities, counties and regional, state and even federal agencies. The result is a highly multi-scale governance system in which decision-makers are influenced by local and regional interactions, while managing the multi-scale and interacting infrastructure that defines the shoreline and the transportation networks. This research project focuses on how the interaction of environmental forcing with the shoreline infrastructure disrupts the transportation network, and how both of these networks influence the governance network that makes planning decisions about the infrastructure. In the context of coastal flooding, this work will provide insights into how governance institutions and networks are prepared, or can be better prepared, to make effective decisions about infrastructure planning and operation. Understanding the threat of flooding in urbanized coastal communities requires the integration of climate sciences, coastal oceanography and hydrodynamics, transportation engineering and planning and political science. In this Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) collaborative research project, these disciplines will be formally linked with one another using computational and empirical approaches to define the network structures. The goal is to examine multi-scale interactions between infrastructure and governance networks in the context of disruption by coastal inundation and flooding events. The underlying hydrodynamics and the nature of the transportation network ensure cross-scale interactions, both spatially and temporally, which must be a component of regional and local decision-making and governance. Through the use of state-of-the-art hydrodynamic models, projections will be developed for future inundation due to sea level rise, oceanic water level fluctuations including tides, and precipitation and runoff. With an inverse modeling approach, we will determine the local and regional impacts of infrastructure projects on water level and inundation, which will link to analyses of both the transportation infrastructure and the regional governance network. The transportation network will be analyzed to define both the short-term disruption of travel times by inundation events and the long-term optimal resource allocation across the network. The spatial structures inherent in the inundation and transportation network results will be compared to the empirically-defined governance network to examine whether the governance network is well-suited to manage the risks and actions associated with future inundation and associated transportation disruptions. The interaction between these three infrastructure networks (shoreline, transportation and governance) will be quantitatively analyzed to establish similarities in topology and flow and the influence of each network on the others. By applying this research on interacting infrastructure systems to the real-world problem of coastal flooding, an opportunity will be created to inform communities' proactive preparation for sea level rise, including decision-making about both transportation and shoreline infrastructure development. In the San Francisco Bay Area, work will be done with the Climate Readiness Institute to connect with practitioners and managers through a series of workshops designed to inform the research and communicate research findings. Finally, the interdisciplinary nature of the research provides an outstanding opportunity for young scientists to develop. The project will involve 2 postdoctoral scholars and 3 graduate students, who will be involved with all aspects of the project, including outreach through the creation of "CRI Fellows" who connect directly with area practitioners.