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Built infrastructures are increasingly disrupted by climate-related extreme events. Being able to monitor what climate change implies for US infrastructures is of considerable importance to all levels of decision-makers. A capacity to develop cross-cutting, widely applicable indicators for more than a dozen different kinds of infrastructure, however, is severely limited at present. The development of such indicators must be considered an ongoing activity that will require expansion and refinement. A number of recent consensus reports suggest four priorities for indicators that portray the impacts of climate change, climate-related extreme events, and other driving forces on infrastructure. These are changes in the reliability of infrastructure services and the implications for costs; changes in the resilience of infrastructures to climate and other stresses; impacts due to the interdependencies of infrastructures; and ongoing adaptation in infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing sustainable and resilient buildings is a complex process involving multiple actors and numerous, often conflicting, criteria to describe the social, environmental, and economic consequences of design decisions. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a well-established branch of systematic decision science that may be used to narrow the choice set and balance decision criteria and objectives. MCDM methods rely on eliciting decision makers' (DM) criteria preferences through surveys—a critical, but often time-consuming and expensive process. This study compares two survey methods—Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique and Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives—used to capture DM's preferences for subjective criteria relevant to the design of resilient and sustainable buildings. Significant differences were found between the results of the two methods, indicating that building design criteria are evaluated differently in different contexts. However, most DMs reported that both surveys accurately captured their preferences, complicating conclusions about DM's actual preferences through single surveys. The design professionals surveyed also report lower cognitive load for the direct weighting method. Although this study does not report a preferred survey method, the findings suggest that great care must be taken when eliciting DM preferences, and when attempting to apply MCDM to building design decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents challenges to mainstream regional science that stem from the fact that regional economies are subsumed within larger social, economic and environmental systems. The constraints imposed by these systems are systematically overlooked or misidentified. The challenges that arise for regional science are of conceptual, methodological and empirical nature and have far-reaching implications for the uses and usefulness of regional science analysis in support of investment and policy making. The paper attends to both the challenges and ways they can be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluations of water footprint (WF) used to enhance performance of policies on water utilization will benefit from combining WF analysis with methods from sustainability analysis. For this purpose, this paper analyzes the WF of China's five main food crops, which together account for roughly 33 % of the nation's water consumption. We assess distributional equity at the provincial scale and use the IPAT identity and a decoupling analysis to assess the scale of both national and provincial WF consumption, the factors influencing the WF fluctuation, and the efficiency of water allocation. Results show that although it is difficult in the short term to end the unsustainable WFs of China's five main food crops, more efficient allocation can be achieved through appropriate agricultural policy modification. In the long term, distributional equity at the provincial level must be the key factor in achieving sustainable agriculture in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rising sea levels and possible storm intensification due to climate change, current United States urban coastal flood management strategies will be challenged. Due to limitations of current flood management strategies, evacuation is likely to become increasingly prominent in many coastal areas. Thus it is important to think critically about challenges for successful evacuation planning, particularly for vulnerable communities. This paper brings together the evacuation planning, climate change and environmental justice literatures. We describe the unique challenges that environmental justice communities face with evacuation, and identify best practice guidelines to improve the quality of evacuation planning for these communities. The guidelines presented, while not comprehensive, provide a framework for planners and policymakers to consider when developing evacuation plans, both for current and future climate conditions, and could improve the quality of evacuation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first quantitative synthesis of the rapidly growing literature on future tropical and extratropical cyclone damages under climate change. We estimate a probability distribution for the predicted impact of changes in global surface air temperatures on future storm damages, using an ensemble of 478 estimates of the temperature-damage relationship from nineteen studies. Our analysis produces three main empirical results. First, we find strong but not conclusive support for the hypothesis that climate change will cause damages from tropical cyclones and wind storms to increase, with most models predicting higher future storm damages due to climate change. Second, there is substantial variation in projected changes in losses across regions. Potential changes in damages are greatest in the North Atlantic basin, where the multi-model average predicts that a 2.5 °C increase in global surface air temperature would cause hurricane damages to increase by 63 %. The ensemble predictions for Western North Pacific tropical cyclones and European wind storms (extratropical cyclones) are +28 % and +23 %, respectively. Finally, our analysis shows that existing models of storm damages under climate change generate a wide range of predictions, ranging from moderate decreases to very large increases in losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]