Climate and Related Uncertainties Influencing Research and Development Priorities

Sources of risk and uncertainty are key drivers of research and development (R&D) priorities for infrastructure assets, projects, and policies. This paper describes risk factoring, which is a quantification of what combination of climate and other uncertain factors can most disrupt the R&D priorities of large industry and government facilities. The factors addressed herein include sea-level change, storm intensity and frequencies, precipitation, erosion, coastal demographics, and others. This process engages planners in four aspects: (1) a baseline multicriteria decision analysis of infrastructure resilience; (2) identification of scenarios of factors including sea-level rise, storm frequency, erosion, land-use regulation, ecology, hydrology, etc.; (3) ordering of agency initiatives and finding which scenarios most disrupt that order; and (4) stakeholder elicitation in adaptive iterations. The results of the process constitute an R&D roadmap for addressing factors that impact the resilience of the infrastructure. The roadmap describes which factors—considered singly or in combination—demonstrate relatively greater need for further investigation and modeling.