INNOVATION Centennial Collectors Edition January-February 2020

“We’ll need to think about climate impacts beyond exactly what we’re looking at in front of us at the table,” Porter says. “We’ll need to consider the broader impacts the project is going to have, what cascading impacts it will have on the wider, bigger picture, and who we need to bring into the conversation to help us understand those things.” Systems-wide, contextual, risk-based approaches to projects will be essential. For example, when engineers design a piece of infrastructure in a particular location, climate science indicates the range in which temperature and precipitation will likely increase in that region. With that information, Porter says, “We can start asking, ‘How vulnerable will this infrastructure be if the environment changes? If wildfire risk increases, how does that affect our design? If precipitation increases,

do we need to consider what we’re doing to manage flash flooding?’ We don’t know exactly what number to use to assess risk, but we’ll know enough to ask how it will affect our design.” This, he says, will be “a real change in professional practice—it won’t be a blanket, prescriptive method.” He notes that engineers and geoscientists will need to consider cumulative impacts of multiple climate-induced risks—wildfire, flood, sea level rise, and so on—on projects. Potential failure will be another important consideration—how, for example, a power outage caused by a windstorm might affect broader community safety, resilience and functioning, and how project design might lessen those cascading effects. Choice of energy source will become as important as a project’s energy efficiency—with preference given to carbon-neutral sources. Choice of materials used—and

Innovation has covered many different forms of alternative energy, such as solar (November/December 2018), tidal/wave (May/June 2018), biomass (November/December 2018), and geothermal (March/April 2019). Alternative energy sources, like this SunMine solar project in Kimberly, BC, will increasingly govern design decisions in the coming years. P hoto : C ity of K imberley .

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