Reconciling complexity and deep uncertainty in infrastructure design for climate adaptation

TLDR

Climate change poses a major challenge to infrastructure, as its rapid pace exceeds the expected lifetime of critical systems and pushes them beyond their original design conditions. This study evaluates how existing infrastructure design approaches—fail‑safe, armoring, low regret, safe‑to‑fail, and adaptive management—handle climate‑related complexity and uncertainty via the Cynefin and Deep Uncertainty Frameworks. The authors applied the Cynefin and Deep Uncertainty Frameworks to analyze each design approach’s capacity to address climate complexity and uncertainty. Results show that current design approaches vary in validity across spatial and temporal scales, with most common methods addressing lower levels of complexity and uncertainty than climate change requires, indicating that approaches targeting complexity and deep uncertainty remain underutilized.

Abstract

As climate change is emerging as a major challenge for man-made systems in the coming century, there has been significant effort to understand how to position infrastructure to adapt and deliver services reliably. Particularly, the climate is changing faster than the expected lifetime of critical infrastructure, resulting in situations well beyond the intended design conditions of a stationary climate. This study assesses how well existing infrastructure design approaches – traditional fail-safe, armoring, low regret, safe-to-fail, and adaptive management – account for climate-related complexity and uncertainty through an application of the Cynefin and Deep Uncertainty Frameworks. The results indicate that existing infrastructure design approaches have varying levels of validity for addressing climate change across spatial and temporal scales. The most common infrastructure design approaches undertake lower levels of complexity and uncertainty than climate change demands, indicating the potential of approaches that address complexity and deep uncertainty have not been fully realized.