Our Infrastructure Is Being Built for a Climate That’s Already Gone
Climate change and related environmental factors mean that the kinds of civil infrastructure built in the past no longer provide a reliable guide for designing, building or replacing electrical power lines, roads, dams, railways, reservoirs, sewage systems, pipelines and other essential public amenities. Engineers such as Mikhail Chester, a Fulton Schools associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering, warn that using the old models will produce infrastructure that is likely to fail when facing the array of changes in water flow, temperatures, storm severity and similar climatological trends already affecting much of world. As never before, Chester says, we must design for uncertainty and extremes.