Resilience of Water Management Infrastructure

This chapter presents a compilation of work conducted by the ASCE Task Committee ‘Infrastructure Impacts of Landscape-driven Weather Change’ under the ASCE Watershed Management Technical Committee and the ASCE Hydroclimate Technical Committee. The chapter argues for explicitly considering the well-established feedbacks triggered by infrastructure systems to the land-atmosphere system via landscape change. A definition for Infrastructure Resilience (IR) at the intersection of extreme weather and climate is provided for the engineering community. The broader range of views and issues than what is currently in the front view of engineering practice is expected to ensure more robust approaches for resilience assessment by the engineering community by affording a greater number of ‘scenarios’ in its decision-making. The engineering community needs to understand the predictive uncertainty of changes to extreme weather and climate and how it can be addressed to improve infrastructure design and operations.