A Safety Factor Approach to Designing Urban Infrastructure for Dynamic Conditions

Current approaches to design flood-sensitive infrastructure typically assume a stationary rainfall distribution and neglect many uncertainties. These assumptions are inconsistent with observations that suggest intensifying extreme precipitation events the uncertainties surrounding projections of coupled natural-human systems. Here we demonstrate safety factor approach designing urban in changing climate. Our results show assuming climate stationarity neglecting deep can drastically underestimate flood risks lead poor choices. We find uncertainty dominates socioeconomic engineering impact hydraulic reliability stormwater drainage quantify upfront costs needed achieve higher robustness against rainfall, surface runoff characteristics, lifetime. Depending on location, adding factors 1.4 1.7 standard pipe guidance produces robust performance considered The insights gained from this study highlight need for updating traditional strategies improve under environmental changes.