Designing for the Future: Science with Society

Abstract:

Design floods have been used for building and managing infrastructure for decades. A manager makes a decision about the amount of risk they are willing to accept, generally as a trade-off between flooding and financial, societal, ecosystem, or political issues. Although there is great concern about the potential effects of climate change on the largest floods, current research using systematic streamflow records have not shown an unambiguous increasing trend in these large floods. The rate and impact of smaller, more frequently occurring floods, however, is increasing in many urbanized areas due to the increase of high-intensity precipitation events. Urban areas are therefore faced with mitigating more frequent events in the face of a changing climate, increasing populations, greater societal demands and the lack of economically feasible solutions.

Although urban flooding is a growing global problem, the unique hydrological, physical, and social characteristics of communities suggests that solutions are best developed locally and that solutions based on a standard design flood may not always be economically or socially viable in all situations. While emerging science and modeling tools may provide increasingly reliable estimates of future flooding under a changing climate, application of this scientific understanding to solve local problems means that researchers should begin thinking about science with society rather science for society. This presentation will explore how sophisticated tools for flood frequency estimation can be combined with a science with society approach to help address growing urban flooding issues.