Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering University of Wisconsin - Madison
The unequal development of stormwater infrastructure systems and the associated impacts of hydrologic disasters disproportionately impact low-income households and people of color across the United States. As global temperatures rise, the impacts of climate change are expected to further exacerbate these inequalities through increased extreme weather, more intense flooding, and limited coping capacity. While traditional flood management decision-making typically prioritizes economic objectives, we develop an integrated social and physical decision-making framework to explore more equitable resource management outcomes. We employ a participatory community-focused approach by conducting surveys and interviews to assess community attitudes, objectives, and preferences regarding current flood and inundation management strategies. Various weighting schemes and Bayesian approaches are explored to develop flood management strategies and priorities based on community input. We leverage a nowcast-forecast system to provide water levels and flood inundation for lakes in Madison, Wisconsin, conditioned on the objectives and strategies prioritized, considering a variety of flood events, to understand the potential changes in outcomes as compared to traditional approaches. The limits of current management and the need for additional infrastructure can also be informed from these analysis.
