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Infrastructure is the backbone of any modern society. Infrastructure includes roads, rails, and ports, a system of facilities to facilitate the movement of goods and people. Included in infrastructure is water treatment, wastewater and stormwater systems. Civil or environmental engineers design these systems; however many occupations are involved in the planning, maintenance and daily operations.
The Infrastructure Working Group (IWG) formed in 2020 to address technical issues that the engineering community faces in designing, operating and maintaining Wisconsin’s infrastructure and future considerations for the construction sectors.
The IWG’s leadership expertise is in water resources — stormwater, transportation, hydrology, and construction materials. Other infrastructure such as broadband, energy, hazardous waste, inland waterways, public parks, schools, or transit are not in scope for this group.
Infrastructure Issues in Wisconsin
Public infrastructure managers face many challenges in maintaining the infrastructure system in Wisconsin. Aging infrastructure tops the list in a survey conducted in 2020 of public infrastructure managers, elected officials, planners, and infrastructure consultants.
Replacing infrastructure is a high-cost investment that officials must balance among other needs in a community. Disasters disrupt community priorities, such as when flooding results in road washouts. Communities are suddenly faced with reconstructing a road. A second concern for infrastructure managers, planners, elected officials and infrastructure consultants in Wisconsin is pavement deterioration, which is also an issue for users as roads will impact travel speed and wear on tires.
Inadequate capital funding and insufficient revenues from taxpayers to cover operations and maintenance costs are common concerns among municipalities which can further impact when to replace aging infrastructure.
The combination of these concerns hints that our current funding system is not working. We need to redesign a more sustainable funding stream to address aging infrastructure and pavement deterioration, as well as other infrastructure problems. To complicate matters, the uncertainty of the frequency of future climate impacts and how to design future infrastructure is a design engineer’s concern.
The Infrastructure Working Group has identified updating rainfall data as its signature contribution to the design community. The Wisconsin Rainfall Project helps to change the mindset of using historical data to predict future rainfall to developing a data set that projects rainfall into the future. This product will help managers “adapt” to climate change.
A second contribution is the development of a baseline of practice in Wisconsin that documents issues and barriers facing professionals associated with infrastructure management. This is summarized in the Wisconsin Infrastructure and Climate Change Survey 2020 report.
A third contribution is a roadmap for measuring the carbon footprint of construction projects, beginning with mining of raw materials, to transportation and installation. This project is a first step in mitigating or reducing carbon emissions in Wisconsin.
With the likelihood of federal infrastructure funding to rebuild and address climate change impacts, along with the Justice40 Initiative, infrastructure managers have an opportunity to make their communities resilient for all residents.
Summary of Climate Issues
Learn about the impacts to different types of infrastructure resulting from more frequent, intense rainfall.
Airports
- Pavement deterioration
Bridges, Culverts and Dams (Hydraulic Structures)
- Roadway culvert and bridge failure due to overtopping flow
- Bridge structure and footings failure due to increased discharge
- Embankment and retaining wall failure due to overtopping in floods
- Dam spillway failure due to inadequate capacity
- Continued and exacerbated disconnection of stream segments due to covert capacity and invert alignment
Drainage Systems
- Inaccurate and underestimated hydrologic design of stormwater management and river crossing structures
- Exacerbated urban flooding in both storm drainage and urban watercourses
- Underestimation of floodplain storage benefits, water velocities and public safety risk
Runoff Quality
- More precipitation, especially more early and late-season precipitation will produce higher rural and urban sediment and water quality runoff loading.
- Higher runoff volume rates will reduce performance of urban stormwater management systems including infiltration basins and water quality treatment ponds.
Roads and Rails
- Road and rail washouts
- Rockslides
- Damage to road right-of-way that undermines roadbeds
- Potholes
Sanitary Sewer Systems and Wastewater Treatment Facilities
- Possible increased groundwater elevations producing more sanitary sewer infiltration driven by larger precipitation depths and more fall and early spring recharge
- Increased surface water runoff flooding producing increased inflow into sanitary sewers leading to more sanitary sewer overflows
Strategies for Infrastructure Managers
A vulnerability assessment is a first step in determining the climate risks for any type of infrastructure. The following strategies could be part of an infrastructure manager’s roadmap for adapting to climate change or mitigating greenhouse gasses. Strategies could also provide community co-benefits ranging from improvements in air quality, use of trees for shading, or improvements in noise levels. A second strategy is to develop scenarios that reflect three climate scenarios.
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Solutions
Many strategies are operational solutions, meaning “doing more of something.” For example, filling more potholes. A true solution, however, would be aimed at the reason why potholes form in the first place. Advances in new materials such as self-healing pavements and smart concrete may make roads less expensive to maintain in the future.
An operational solution around heat affecting airplane takeoff may be to change the timing of flights to cooler times of the day. A longer-term solution would be to re-design the aircraft using lighter materials that resist hotter temperatures.
Many technologies are being developed to mitigate climate change, some that could be incorporated into the infrastructure, where the infrastructure itself captures or regenerates energy or carbon. One early-stage technology is using wireless to regenerate electric bus batteries so that there is no downtime for charging the fleet.
Besides technology solutions waiting to make it to market, there is other information infrastructure managers need to understand about the risks, return of investment and the opportunities of making infrastructure more resilient to the impact of climate change in Wisconsin and accelerating decarbonization.
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Environmental Climate Justice Issues
As pressure to develop increases, environmental and climate justice concerns are present in the design, operation, management, and financing of Wisconsin’s infrastructure.
Planning of Adaptation Projects
The planning process and prioritization of where investments are made (e.g., what side of town) can have huge implications for a community’s resilience in the face of environmental pollution and/or climate change. These planning decisions often include a cost-benefit analysis. This analysis should be based on a comprehensive vulnerability analysis and alternatives development and selection that includes the social costs of project impacts to properly ensure environmental and climate justice.
Reducing the Embedded Carbon Content of Construction Projects to Help Mitigate Greenhouse Gas Emissions
As planners and contractors start thinking about how to account for the carbon emissions released to create construction products (the “embedded carbon content”), like concrete and steel, decision makers must ensure that the final process for doing so is equitable. Currently, Wisconsin is in the planning phases for considering these emissions. However, we know that smaller contracting businesses will be less equipped to make the large adjustments required to their business and processes. Decision makers must ensure these smaller businesses receive additional support in making transitions to sustainable practices so they are not left behind in the marketplace.
According to the Justice40 Executive Order, “The order catalyzes the creation of jobs in construction, manufacturing, engineering and the skilled-trades by directing steps to ensure that every federal infrastructure investment reduces climate pollution and that steps are taken to accelerate clean energy and transmission projects under federal siting and permitting processes in an environmentally sustainable manner.”
A climate and economic justice screening tool will be developed by the Council on Environmental Quality to aid in identifying targeted communities.
