Performance Goals for Civil Infrastructure: Managing Risk in an Era of Climate Change

Global warming due to human activities is affecting agricultural production, water resources, transportation, hydroelectric power generation, the built environment, and human welfare. The reality of climate change will have a disruptive and substantial impact on the design and performance assessment of civil infrastructure facilities. Performance assessment of civil infrastructure traditionally has treated environmental demands as if the past is representative of the future (the notion of stationary), an assumption which clearly is not tenable in a changing climate. Risk-informed planning and assessment of civil infrastructure aimed at ensuring resilient communities must address deep uncertainties associated with climate change and the potential consequences of engineering decisions for future generations. The Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE has initiated a technical program to address the impact of climate change on structural design, embodying perspectives on risk that will enable low-regret strategies and equity in civil infrastructure decision-making. In this general presentation, we will highlight progress in this program in the context of the current design and building regulatory environment.

 

About the speaker:

Dr. Ellingwood’s career of five decades has included service in Federal agencies and leading academic institutions. His teaching, research, and professional interests center on the application of methods of probability and statistics to structural engineering and risk-informed decision-making. He is internationally recognized as a leading authority on structural load modeling, reliability and risk analysis of engineered facilities, and the technical development of probability-based codified standards for design of structures. Ellingwood is the author of nearly 500 technical publications, former Editor of Structural Safety, the leading international journal in that field, and serves on several other editorial boards. He has held numerous leadership positions in professional organizations, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Institute of Steel Construction, and the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability, and has received numerous awards from those organizations. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Distinguished Member of ASCE.

 

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session led by Boaz Nadav Manes, Lehigh’s University Librarian. This event is free and open to the public.