A review of infrastructure challenges: assessing stormwater system sustainability.

The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering in its Vision 2020 statement identified sustainability in infrastructure as a core element for the civil engineering profession. However, what is sustainable infrastructure and more importantly, how can it be assessed? This paper uses stormwater infrastructure as its primary example to explore these issues, reviews issues with stormwater infrastructure in Canada, and critically examines current sustainability assessment methods. Two groups of problems are identified. The first group concerns issues related to economic, institutions, population growth, ecological, and health and safety. The second group examines the uncertainties in impact prediction associated with climate change effects as well as health impacts on the user. Sustainability evaluation methods (ranking, sustainability indicators, footprint, metabolism, extended metabolism, life cycle assessment), performance assessment tools, infrastructure report card, and the public infrastructure engineering vulnerability committee protocol for climate change assessment are then reviewed. Current methods of assessing infrastructure mostly focus on the functional aspects of the system with resource use reduction as the primary objective. However, they do not explicitly concentrate on resiliency and long-term sustainability, nor do they consider the associated health implications and change management capabilities for long-term sustainability. A new comprehensive framework would be required to assess broad, emerging issues related to infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]