GUEST LECTURE: Designing climate resilient infrastructure systems and policies

Designing climate resilient infrastructure systems and policies

Time: Thursday March 20, 10:30am

Location: SU225 – Students Union Building, 235 College Street (this is the student union building just west of the bookstore; entry is off of Huron)

Guest speaker
Dr. Costa Samaras, Carnegie Mellon University
Director of Scott Institute for Energy Innovation
Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Abstract: Designing climate resilient infrastructure systems and policies

 Climate change increases risks to the operations and reliability of power, transportation, water, and other infrastructure, and engineers have a responsibility to design and provide resilient systems over multi-decadal infrastructure service lives. But communities, engineers, and governments often do not have usable climate information or resilient engineering methods to design infrastructure– for example, the current precipitation information used for designing stormwater infrastructure in the United States does not include estimates or guidance for designing under climate change. This presentation discusses the process of assessing and addressing climate risk for infrastructure systems, focusing on drinking water systems and stormwater management. First, the presentation compiles measures of drinking water utility climate vulnerability and exposure and pairs them with climate hazard projections to develop a comparative risk index for 1,455 medium and large municipal drinking water utilities in the contiguous U.S. It then uses this climate risk index, along with an analysis of municipal bond official statements, to assess gaps between projected climate risk and climate risk disclosure and identify utilities in need of climate adaptation and resilience planning. Next, simple recommendations for the use of current precipitation estimates are provided to plan and design climate resilient stormwater infrastructure until updated precipitation estimates are available.  This work provides a model for how drinking water utilities should quantify climate risk and offers recommendations for decision-makers, including utility customers, bond purchasers, infrastructure designers, and government agencies.

Bio: Costa Samaras

Dr. Costa Samaras is the Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, and the Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He analyzes how technologies and policies affect energy and emissions pathways, security, climate resilience, and economic and equity outcomes. From 2021-2024, he served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Principal Assistant Director for Energy, OSTP Chief Advisor for Energy Policy, and then OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition. He assessed technologies and policies to achieve national climate commitments, co-led the White House report “U.S. Innovation to Meet 2050 Climate Goals”, led the climate and clean energy efforts of the President’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence, and was a contributing author to the U.S. National Resilience Framework. He is the Lead Author of the Mitigation Chapter of the 6th U.S. National Climate Assessment, and he was previously a Senior Researcher at the RAND Corporation and a megaprojects engineer for WSP. He received a joint Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon, an MPA in public policy from NYU, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Bucknell University.