Abstract
This article represents the second report by an ASCE Task Committee “Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change” under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. Herein, the ‘infrastructure impacts” are referred to as infrastructure-sensitive changes in weather and climate patterns (extremes and non-extremes) that are modulated, among other factors, by changes in landscape, land use and land cover change. In this first report, the article argued for explicitly considering the well-established feedbacks triggered by infrastructure systems to the land-atmosphere system via landscape change. In this report by the ASCE Task Committee (TC), we present the results of this ASCE TC’s survey of a cross section of experienced water managers using a set of carefully crafted questions. These questions covered water resources management, infrastructure resiliency and recommendations for inclusion in education and curriculum. We describe here the specifics of the survey and the results obtained in the form of statistical averages on the ‘perception’ of these managers. Finally, we discuss what these ‘perception’ averages may indicate to the ASCE TC and community as a whole for stewardship of the civil engineering profession. The survey and the responses gathered are not exhaustive nor do they represent the ASCE-endorsed viewpoint. However, the survey provides a critical first step to developing the framework of a research and education plan for ASCE. Given the Water Resources Reform and Development Act passed in 2014, we must now take into account the perceived concerns of the water management community.
Highlights
Today, water infrastructure is critical to vital sectors of the economy such as energy, transportation, food, and health
The interesting nuance to this issue is that respondents believe that landscape change that result in changing infiltration patterns is another likely driver of the change in water resources patterns
It is important to stress that the survey results do not necessarily reflect a view that is endorsed by American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) or any particular agency
Summary
Water infrastructure is critical to vital sectors of the economy such as energy, transportation, food, and health. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently set up a Task Committee (TC) titled “Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change” in 2014 to create a broader understanding of the resilience of water infrastructure in the face of drivers of change. These drivers, such as the local-regional human drivers of landscape change, provide a complementary view to the more well-known green-house-gas (GHG)-based planetary warming as they focus more on mesoscale-to-regional changes that are of more interest to engineering design and operations. This ASCE TC has summarized its findings from a review of literature on engineering implications for management of water resources in a recent report [1]
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