Climate and other scenarios disrupt priorities in several management perspectives

Abstract

Climate vulnerability and adaptation assessments are increasingly typical of infrastructure agencies. In contrast to global emissions reductions, adaptation decision making tends to occur on smaller geographic scales and nearer time horizons. The supporting analyses are performed by local agencies with relatively sparse data and few resources. Recent efforts of the authors introduced scenario-based preferences to perform risk analysis for these agencies in a single perspective, updating management priorities when climate and non-climate stressors combine. On the other hand, a single perspective fails to account for the complexities of infrastructures, organizations, and stakeholders. Several perspectives should include asset management, project selection, policy-making, demography/geography, research and development, and others. This paper develops a framework to address several management perspectives, finding the implications of climate and other conditions to update agency priorities. The framework is demonstrated for a twenty-year transportation plan with approximately 600 square miles in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. The demonstration includes that a scenario of climate combined with increased travel demand is relatively more influential across several perspectives, when considering climate both alone and in combination with each of economic recession, wear and tear, and ecosystem stressors.