CLIMA: Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Adaptations for Maladaptive Levee Networks

在美国，数以百万计的人和数万亿美元的财产被堤坝系统保护，免受洪水侵袭。然而，大多数由联邦政府监控的堤坝都没有达到最低认证标准。此外，气候变化加剧了洪水泛滥，可能会使目前的堤防保护在未来变得不够充分。升级和扩建现有堤坝需要大量投资，可能不会给特定河网的所有社区带来净积极影响。气候变化减缓和适应民用基础设施研究(CLIMA)项目旨在通过探索一个理论指导的系统建模框架来解决这个问题，以设计具有气候弹性的堤坝基础设施，以公平的方式支持泛滥平原社区。该项目关注两个相互关联的问题：(1)堤防网络的性能、未来气候、自然基础设施和行为反馈之间的相互作用如何推动社区洪水风险的变化；(2)设计调整如何重新设想一个支持公平、有弹性和可持续社区的堤防网络。为了解决这些问题，该项目创建了一个新的系统建模框架来评估堤防适应战略，考虑了堤防决策中经常被忽视的因素，如自然洪水基础设施、堤防性能的可变性、气候变化、堤防建设的意外后果和社会公平。这一框架将堤防视为更大的适应性网络的一部分，在这个网络中，一个社区的堤防决策会影响同一流域的其他社区。通过适应视角，该项目促进了以下方面的知识：天然洪水基础设施减少对堤坝的需求并实现共同利益的潜力(例如减少淡水污染)、推动流域堤防性能的岩土因素以及使堤坝适应不断变化的洪水情况的干预措施和政策选择。通过促进确定复原力建设战略，这些进展有可能使全国的泛滥平原社区受益。通过利用广泛的生物物理和社会数据集，包括土工现场和社区调查等新来源，该项目创造性地将自然基础设施、堤防基础设施、洪水淹没风险和堤防决策的计算模型结合在一起。这种综合方法产生了详细的堤防适应和堤防分析路线图，允许做出更明智的决策，优先考虑公平、弹性和成本效益。该项目得到了工程局(ENG)土木工程、机械和制造业创新司(CMMI)的人类、灾害和建筑环境(HDBE)计划和民用基础设施系统(CIS)计划的支持。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Millions of people and trillion dollars of property in the US are protected from flooding by levee systems. However, most federally monitored levees fall short of minimum accreditation standards. Further, climate change exacerbates flooding, likely making current levee protection inadequate in the future. Upgrading and extending existing levees require substantial investments and may not lead to net positive effects for all communities across a given river network. This CiviL Infrastructure research for climate change Mitigation and Adaptation (CLIMA) project aims to address this problem by exploring a theory-guided systems modeling framework for designing climate-resilient levee infrastructure that supports floodplain communities in an equitable way. The project focuses on two interrelated questions: (1) How interactions between a levee network’s performance, future climates, natural infrastructure, and behavioral feedback drive changes in flood risk across communities; and (2) How design adaptations reimagine a levee network that supports equitable, resilient, and sustainable communities. To address them, the project creates a novel systems modeling framework to evaluate levee adaptation strategies, considering factors often overlooked in levee decision-making, such as natural flood infrastructure, variability in levee performance, climate change, unintended consequences of levee construction, and social equity. This framework sees levees as part of a larger adaptive network, where levee decisions made in one community affect others in the same watershed. Through the adaptation lens, the project advances knowledge of the potential of natural flood infrastructure to reduce the need for levees and achieve co-benefits (such as reducing freshwater pollution), the geotechnical factors that drive levee performance at the watershed level, and the interventions and policy options for adapting levees to changing flood conditions. These advancements have the potential to benefit floodplain communities nationwide by facilitating the identification of resilience-building strategies. By utilizing extensive biophysical and social datasets, including new sources like geotechnical field and community surveys, the project creatively couples computational models of natural infrastructure, levee infrastructure, flood inundation risk, and levee decision-making. This integrated approach yields detailed roadmaps of levee adaptations and levee analytics, allowing for better-informed decisions that prioritize equity, resilience, and cost-effectiveness.This project is supported by the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) Program and the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Program of the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) of the Directorate for Engineering (ENG).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.