Infrastructure as social, technical, and environmental systems to advance climate risk governance

The Anthropocene epoch's highly coupled human-natural systems and unprecedented rates of change call for a paradigm shift in environmental planning to help us move from threshold-based to transformational and inclusive process-based policies. In the context of the climate change crisis, there is a very short time window to shift from short-term, single sector, and reactive practices; to policies that aim to change the fundamental attributes of socioeconomic and socioenvironmental systems in anticipation of climate change effects. Process-based policies require us to iteratively address the conditions and systems at the root cause of vulnerabilities, encouraging more systemic, integrated, and deliberately inclusive approaches. We argue that governance and spatial analysis tools can leverage this paradigm shift by better tracing the connection between decision-making power and landscape processes. Drawn from political ecology, disaster risk reduction, and complexity sciences, we hypothesize scale mismatch between policy and expected impacts from climate change to infrastructure systems results in maladaptation. Through two case studies, this dissertation explores in-depth climate risk management gaps in the transportation fuel and airport infrastructure systems. By framing the transportation fuel system (TFS) and airports as sociotechnical and socioenvironmental systems, we develop an approach that recognizes the interconnectedness, dynamic, and multiscalar challenges of networked infrastructure climate risk management. We set important next steps to enhance climate adaptation governance of complex systems.Chapter 1 introduces the background of this research together with key concepts and methods helping the reader navigate the different sections of the dissertation. Chapter 2 sets the theoretical baseline of this research by questioning the influence of critical infrastructure institutional framing of criticality metrics; how it aligns or misaligns with infrastructure resilience policy goals; what gaps are uncovered by these misalignments; and what solutions can be harnessed to address this misalignment based on disaster risk reduction and complexity science theories. Chapter 3 presents the TFS case study, showing how this infrastructure can be framed as a social, technical, and environmental system; and based on this framework, what can be learned from the contemporary TFS vulnerability to climate change that will help improve future TFS resilience and avoid maladaptation. Chapter 4 presents the airport case study and provides a method to identify how climate adaptation practices can emerge through current airport regulatory structures; and what are the barriers and pathways for airport adaptation governance. Chapter 5 combines geographical and topological concepts of space to model exposure of sociotechnical networks using empirical data of the TFS, airports, and coastal flooding projections. It provides applied examples of how to measure the links between climate-induced landscape hazards, infrastructure systems, and social entities with decision-making power; and how these interlinks identify new stakeholders, new roles, and new forms of collaboration for effective climate adaptation governance. Infrastructure systems enrich this research by providing a much needed lens to advance our knowledge on the networked nature of environmental challenges and vulnerabilities; going further than the simple co-occurrence of hazards and physical assets. Using qualitative methods (stakeholder interviews, policy review, and content analysis) and quantitative methods (Geographic Information Science and network science), infrastructure is modeled not only as technology and hardware, but as organizational and institutional networks tied together through ownership and operational jurisdiction, as well as through constitutive and operational policies. Our approach to infrastructure climate risk governance focuses on the ability of sociotechnical systems to transform adaptively from one configuration to another in anticipation of potential disturbances or shocks. Stakeholders of climate risk, and their institutions, are framed as emergent properties of complex systems, where connectivity patterns between social entities can be identified, studied, and eventually modified for improved system function and resilience. Looking at infrastructure as sociotechnical systems helps link decision-making entities and physical infrastructure across time, landscape processes, and space to optimize the scale of climate adaptation and resilience actions. It also allows expansion of ways in which infrastructure climate adaptation stakeholders can be identified and targeted for collaborative and inclusive decision-making, providing avenues for operationalizing different dimensions of environmental justice.

Advisor: Radke, John D
Gonzalez, Marta C