Standardized Storm Water Infrastructure Design and Planning Protocols for Capacity Limited Communities and Climate Change Uncertainty

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Current engineering design standards that incorporate climate change (CC) allow for a relatively simple and inexpensive inclusion of CC considerations into storm water infrastructure design. However, storm water responses in a watershed are highly dependent on other factors affected by CC that increase the complexity of design considerations. In order to allow for a more complete inclusion of potential impacts and an accounting for the relevant uncertainty of design parameters, new standards need to be developed. Various approaches have been developed for resilient infrastructure that includes this complexity and can address relatively high levels of uncertainty associated with predicting the future. Most methods take a risk management perspective, whereby adapting to CC requires an accurate description of climate over the time period of consideration that attempts to identify a most likely future for planning. Design then relies on accurate and precise climate predictions and complex modeling efforts. However most small communities throughout Canada have limited capacities that constrain the use of comprehensive methods. This excludes many or most types and levels of knowledge that can be incorporated into the planning and design process. Even with limited capacity and relatively high levels of uncertainty, decisions must be made, and climate adaptation planning and infrastructure design must move forward. Therefore, in addition to quantitative uncertainty analysis, design standards should consider qualitative uncertainty due to limited capacity and resources of a community to engage the relevant expertise and technologies. This research program aims to improve standards and protocols for the design of storm water infrastructure, given stakeholder limitations of financial and technical resources that can account for uncertainty from a range of sources. These sources include uncertainty from observed data, climate change projections, watershed models, expert interpretation, and the capacity of municipalities to engage human and financial resources. This research proposes a modified approach to planning and design of infrastructure that includes community input and feedback at several stages in the design process using scenario analysis in a decision support context. Climate change adaptation can be better achieved by designing for uncertainty by allowing communities to envision future scenarios that can be approached incrementally and improved as potential outcomes are known with more confidence and less uncertainty. This novel approach incorporates multiple scales of the natural and built environment with a focus on design for uncertainty, not with uncertainty. The updated standards account for regional differences in climate change and can be used to improve design standards throughout Canada. This will help transform civil engineering practices to engage communities and develop sustainable and climate change resilient infrastructure.