Social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) dynamics assessment for urban resilience to extreme weather events

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Extreme weather events are the most immediate way that people are experiencing climate change. Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to such events, given their location, concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructures. Impacts of Hurricane Dorian and Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, repetitive Ottawa River Floods, and other disasters demonstrate not just failures in built infrastructure, but also they highlight the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and knowledge systems, also components of urban infrastructure systems, to prepare for and respond to events of this magnitude. To advance established theoretical literature and guide infrastructure development decisions promoting urban resilience, an evidence-based approach is now needed to reveal the social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) dynamics of infrastructure systems in cities. The long-term objective of this work is to advance the theory and understanding of resilient infrastructure design and development and to improve decision-making for future urban resilience to extreme weather events. To provide the foundational elements for achieving the long-term objective, the short-term objectives of this work are: 1) to develop an urban system dynamics modeling framework encompassing SETS interactions; 2) to identify how SETS dynamics contribute to urban resilience to extreme weather events; 3) to apply a coupled infrastructure systems model to evaluate interdependent SETS vulnerabilities to urban flooding; and 4) to facilitate knowledge co-production on SETS resilience capabilities and support decision-making for infrastructure development improving urban resilience. The proposed work will be the frontier of interdisciplinary engineering analysis addressing the complexity of urban systems and infrastructure affected by extreme weather events. This work will contribute to the advancement of the integrative urban system dynamics model, interdependent infrastructure vulnerability assessment to urban flooding, and the participatory decision-making framework for urban resilience and climate adaptation planning in the context of Canadian cities. The outcome of this work will be actionable to support regional governing agencies to re-evaluate current climate adaptation planning and infrastructure development goals in terms of mitigating future climate risk impacts and improving SETS capacities to extreme weather events.