Climate Change: An Evolving Paradigm for Sustainable Infrastructure
As climate change brings profound change to the world’s water cycle, U.S. water utilities are being compelled to rapidly adapt to the ever-evolving conditions to better prepare for threats and hazards and withstand and rapidly recover from adverse climatic events.
The need for responsiveness, planning and investment has been promoted for decades, notably since the U.S. Global Change Research Program was established by Congress in 1990 to coordinate federal research and investment to advance understanding of climate change. In 2023, it published its fifth National Climate Assessment, providing an accounting of climate change’s impact on Earth’s systems and processes — its interconnected land, water and atmosphere. Backed by scientific observation, that assessment details extreme variability in climate-related events, notably the rise in their severity, extent and/or frequency.
Clearly, it’s a complex issue with no simple solutions, no silver bullet. But Black & Veatch’s 2024 Water Report, based on expert analyses of a survey of roughly 630 U.S. water sector stakeholders, brings it all into focus.
The key: Planning, preparedness and a focus on adaptation enables effective response and prevents costly and less effective reactive measures.
Extreme Variability
If necessity is the mother of invention, as the age-old proverb suggests, then performance is the mother of resilience for those in the water industry.
Consider this: Because of the dynamic relationship between people and nature, climate variability is putting lives and livelihoods at grave risk. Inequities are worsening within underserved and marginalized communities. Networks of industry, infrastructure, commodities, goods and services are increasingly vulnerable. And the global financial toll from disasters driven by climate change is astounding; A study published in October 2023 by the journal Nature Communications estimated that such events between 2000 and 2010 have caused damages equivalent to $391 million a day, with researchers determining that droughts and heat waves contributed to about $143 billion of damage annually.
To put a finer point on it, the National Centers for Environmental Information — an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — has reported that the United States experienced a billion-dollar disaster, adjusted for inflation, on average every 82 days in the 1980s; now, there is one on average every 18 days.
Shifting weather patterns, devastating storms and warming average temperatures bring significant threat and damage to the nation’s water resources and infrastructure. Altogether, it is compounding the challenge of water sustainability and resilience.