Building Resiliency Into Infrastructure
April 22, 2022
Many US communities facing flood threats are seeking federal help to fund new infrastructure, but there is some debate about what approaches work best to protect against flooding. In Issues, Thaddeus Miller, Mikhail Chester, and Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson offer a general guide, not only for water projects but for energy and transportation. Given that climate change may bring unprecedented weather events, they write, government at all levels should focus on developing and deploying infrastructure that provides technological, social, institutional, and ecological resilience. One example: building “safe-to-fail” systems that do not promise absolute protection but result in limited damage when they do fail.