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Canada's engineering community has a profound impact on the sustainability of Canada's public infrastructure - and is in a unique position to provide recommendations for adapting infrastructure to extreme weather associated with a changing climate.
This project, funded by Infrastructure Canada through its KOA program, will bring together Canadian Standards Association (CSA) staff and volunteer technical experts to conduct an assessment and make recommendations on the content, approach, and delivery methods to expand engineering knowledge and awareness of issues pertaining to climate change and civil infrastructure.
In the context of this project, civil infrastructure includes:
- Transportation: roads, runways, bridges, shipping
- Buildings: climatic loads, building envelope, geotechnical
- Water: drinking water, storm water, erosion, flood control
- Energy: distribution and generation
Areas of study:
- The basic science of climate change
- Impacts of climate change on civil infrastructure: regional, sectoral and socio-economic
- Adaptation methods
- Risk management in the design of civil infrastructure
- Mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: technologies, processes and systems
Expected results:
The initiative will assist CSA volunteer Technical Committee experts and staff, as they develop and maintain CSA's broad range of standards relating to urban and rural infrastructure works. The benefits from the initiative will extend beyond codes and standards and will be accessible to Canada's network of 160,000 + engineering practitioners, as well as to engineering schools and continuing education providers.
The project is expected to build knowledge capacity as follows:
- Engineering body of Knowledge: by providing descriptions of the available peer-reviewed and/or academic work that is already available, dealing with the relationship between climate change and civil infrastructure
- Gaps: it will identify gaps between the present baseline knowledge and the desired state of knowledge on civil infrastructure issues around climate change for engineers in Canada
- Topics: it will identify and prioritize specific topics for curriculum and knowledge transfer within emerging areas of climate change as it relates to key civil infrastructure asset groups
- Delivery: it will identify and recommend the most effective delivery methods for knowledge transfer to engineering professionals, undergraduate, and post graduate students.
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