Community Based, Science Informed Framework for Infrastructure Resilience Under Climate Extremes скачать в хорошем качестве

Community Based, Science Informed Framework for Infrastructure Resilience Under Climate Extremes

Speaker: Dr. Farshid Vahedifard, Professor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University Across the United States, aging infrastructure is increasingly strained by intensifying extreme weather events, placing communities at growing risk. These impacts are not evenly distributed: environmental hazards and infrastructure failures often disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. This lecture presents how an interdisciplinary framework can be developed to tackle the compounding risks arising from the interplay between aging infrastructure, climate-driven extremes, and social vulnerability. Drawing on recent research on major extreme events (e.g., flooding, heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts) and their impacts on infrastructure systems (e.g., levees, railroads, Superfund sites), the talk illustrates how spatial variations in hazards and exposure shape both physical and societal outcomes. The lecture also introduces emerging data-driven, physics-informed, and community-based approaches for mapping risk, improving risk communication, and supporting more equitable adaptation strategies to strengthen infrastructure resilience. The discussion concludes by outlining pathways for integrating these insights into climate-adaptive infrastructure planning, resilience investment, and inclusive decision-making in an era of accelerating environmental change. This lecture is sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. To sign up for more talks, visit the link: https://as.tufts.edu/environmentalstu... Dr. Vahedifard is a professor and Louis Berger Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University. Further, he serves as the Lead, Resilient and Equitable Infrastructure at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Canada. His research efforts primarily encompass the areas of civil and geotechnical engineering, interfacing with the grand challenges of Climate Change, Resilient Infrastructure, and Environmental Justice. His interdisciplinary work has centered around studying the resilience and adaptation of infrastructure in the face of extreme events (e.g., droughts, floods, wildfires, and cascading hazards) in a changing climate. He has led several transdisciplinary research initiatives focused on emerging issues that relate to climate-resilient communities and infrastructure systems, aging infrastructure, extreme events, cascading hazards, inclusive adaptation, and environmental justice. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the recipient of several awards, including the Norman Medal, MSU Annual Research Award, MS ASCE Engineer of the Year Award, the Best Paper award from the ASTM Geotechnical Testing Journal, and the Federal Laboratory Consortium Interagency Partnership award.