Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, and Mark Heatsgaard’s Hot-Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth—are three contemporary texts that focus on climate change. When a trained and experienced water supply engineer finished the last page of each, he experienced an “aha” moment: all of his basic design training and experience was no longer applicable for the challenges that the human race will face over the next 50 years.

A flood mitigation assignment on a river north of Boston has experienced a statistical 50-year or greater storm event five times in the last 16 years. This is just one small example of the dramatic changes that will force an adaptation in the way humans analyze and design water infrastructure, from water supply, wastewater, and stormwater systems to management of surface water resources—including the country’s elaborate system of dams and levees.

These changes are alarming. Even a peer group of highly trained, intelligent engineers and scientists today will debate whether these changes are real phenomena, whether they are something society has caused, and what—if anything—can be done about it. Regardless of the difference in opinion, reasonable minds all agree that the weather is changing. Pointing blame or fault on societies or nature misses the point: water management professionals at all levels should be taking a leadership role in understanding and preparing for climate change.

BRIGHT LINESThe Challenge of Change:

Climate Change and Water Infrastructure

2014 All Rights Reserved. | www.kleinfelder.com

The Challenge of Change: Climate Change and Water Infrastructure

Climate change offers an enormous opportunity for the architecture and engineering community to step out from the shadows and set a clear, compelling vision to rival the boldness of the 1930s-1940s Works Progress Administration program, the 1960s “Man to the Moon” mission, and the yet-unfulfilled vision of U.S. energy independence. Furthermore, water management professionals should couple this bold vision with a completely aligned and complementary benefit of dramatically reducing unemployment in the U.S. by designing and modernizing the country’s aging infrastructure (which, in many cases, quickly approaches 70 to 100 years of age).

Where’s the downside in all of this? The answer is another question: How do we pay for it? To answer that, one might ask an even further question: If humans can afford to pay for annual disaster relief after spring floods and summer hurricanes and tornadoes, can’t they also find a way to financially handle climate change? The preponderance of scientific research suggests that these events will only become more common, more intense, more damaging, and more expensive to recover from. Unplanned disaster relief will have real cost (not to mention loss of life) that, historically, humans never factored into typical cost/benefit analyses. When professionals start including these disaster relief costs, the industry will develop starkly different conclusions in terms of financial justification of water infrastructure renewal programs. The industry can then build upon the emerging science of infrastructure asset management, where condition assessment and risk and consequence of failure will help establish necessary priorities.

Water management professionals must take a leadership role to educate elected officials, and the public at large, that now is the time to financially contribute for the benefit of future generations—as previous generations did for today’s society. Previous generations paid for and created the high-quality infrastructure fundamental to the quality of life often now taken for granted, and now is time for today’s generation to do the same—even if it takes some modest sacrifices to do so.

2014 All Rights Reserved. | www.kleinfelder.com