By Robert L. Reid
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres describes the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming as “a code red for humanity.” Civil engineers are working to limit the emission of greenhouse gases, preserve resources, and promote resiliency to ensure that the infrastructure they design and build today will withstand the impacts of a changing environment tomorrow.
This is the first in a series of articles on infrastructure resilience that Civil Engineering plans to publish this year. Future articles will focus on specific climate threats and how civil engineers are working to mitigate the potential damage and keep critical infrastructure systems in operation.
The world’s climate is changing — and those changes are bringing significant impacts that will affect the way infrastructure is designed and constructed. Civil Engineering spoke with more than a dozen engineers — from the public and private sectors, academia, and advocacy groups — who are involved in studying the potential impacts of climate change and working to develop the proper engineering responses. They make it clear that the civil engineering profession has a significant role to play in helping the world adapt to these new conditions.
On Aug. 9, 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report — Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis — warning that climate change “is widespread, rapid, and intensifying.” Prepared by 234 scientists from 66 countries, the IPCC report declared that human-induced climate change “is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe ... in the atmosphere, in the oceans, (in) ice floes, and on land.”
Many of the observed changes “are unprecedented,” the report states, “and some of the shifts are in motion now, while some — such as continued sea level rise — are already ‘irreversible’ for centuries to millennia ahead.”
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as “a code red for humanity,” adding that the “alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.”
Feeling the impact
The world is already experiencing the effects of climate change, the report noted, in the form of prolonged droughts, increased numbers of wildfires, extremes in precipitation, extensive flooding, intense tropical cyclones, and the loss of Arctic sea ice, snow cover, and permafrost. Such effects will likely increase if action is not taken to limit warming.
At 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, there will be “increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, and shorter cold seasons,” the report concluded.
At 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, “heat extremes are more likely to reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health,” the report stated. Rainfall patterns will also be disrupted, with “more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.”
The effects of climate change “may be magnified” in the world’s cities, especially coastal cities, which could face increasing heat and heavy precipitation, the report noted. “Moreover, coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion,” the report warned. “Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.”
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