Built to Last: Challenges and Opportunities for Climate-Smart Infrastructure in California

This white paper from the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) presents key principles, barriers, and high-level recommendations for achieving climate-smart infrastructure in California. The focus is on state-level actions that can accelerate broad-scale implementation of replacing or retrofitting existing public infrastructure with resilient infrastructure built to face climate impacts. Agency staff and policymakers can use the information and policy recommendations to inform equitable and climate-smart considerations throughout the infrastructure life cycle. Although the report is tailored to California, the principles and recommendations will be useful for audiences in other states as well.

Following Governor Jerry Brown’s 2015 Executive Order B-30-15 requiring consideration of climate change impacts in the State's Infrastructure Investment Plan and in all state planning and investment decisions, this work aims to guide state-level actions and investments toward long-term, climate-ready infrastructure solutions. The four principles presented here offer an elaboration of some of those first described in USC’s Toward Climate Resilience: A Framework and Principles for Science-Based Adaptation:

  1. Use the best available climate science to inform infrastructure plans and decisions. 
  2. Prioritize considerations and equitable outcomes for underserved populations throughout the infrastructure life cycle.
  3. Consider climate-related costs and risks as well as climate-resilient benefits and opportunities in infrastructure planning and design.
  4. Resilient infrastructure processes should be proactive and transparent while incorporating “systems thinking” to understand the broader context and connectedness of a given project.

Barriers to progress for implementing climate-smart infrastructure are presented along with key recommendations to address those challenges, including to:

  • Review and update design standards, codes, and material specifications to better address future climate conditions.
  • Strengthen local-level technical capacity by supporting more regional and local technical assistance for climate-smart considerations.
  • Establish a state coordinating center offering agency staff standardized and actionable climate-related guidance.
  • Incorporate climate-related costs and risks as well as climate-resilient benefits, co-benefits, and opportunities into economic assessments of infrastructure projects.
  • Require climate-smart criteria and deliverables for use of public funds in infrastructure projects.
  • Identify new and creative funding opportunities and financing mechanisms to meet the need for resilient infrastructure
  • Encourage climate-risk disclosures to promote transparent investments.
  • Plan for and incentivize proactive climate-smart approaches to disaster recovery.
  • Build local planning capacity and increase transparency and inclusion in public infrastructure decisions.
  • Improve agency coordination across sectors and jurisdictions.

Examples of where some of these principles and recommendations have successfully been applied within California and beyond are provided throughout the paper. California’s progress toward climate-smart infrastructure is also highlighted throughout, including the creation of:

  • the Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group under AB 2800 to make recommendations to the legislature for climate-smart design standards and 
  • The Planning and Investing for a Resilient California guidebook offering high-level guidance on integrating climate considerations into state planning and investment decisions.

USC also acknowledges that structural racism and disenfranchisement have resulted in lower quality, and sometimes absent, public infrastructure for underserved communities, thereby increasing their vulnerability to climate change. To truly build resilience, therefore, climate-smart infrastructure solutions should include the needs of underserved populations and actively work toward reversing historic disinvestment and discrimination patterns. 

 

Publication Date: November 2017

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  • Policy analysis/recommendations

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