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Sustainability
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Reshaping Infrastructure for a Sustainable and Resilient Future
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Reshaping Infrastructure for a Sustainable and Resilient Future

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2023) | Viewed by 5507

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Tian Tang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Sustainability and Governance Lab, Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Interests: energy policy; technology policy; technology innovation; digital governance; smart cities; sustainability
Dr. Eren Erman Ozguven

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Interests: modeling of emergency evacuation operations; emergency inventory management; simulation and modeling of transportation networks; traffic safety and accessibility; multi-modal transportation; intelligent transportation systems; smart cities and urban mobility
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Infrastructure systems in urban and rural communities need to be resiliently and sustainably built and upgraded to support the basic functions of our society. Climate change, combined with other human and environmental stressors, has led to more frequent extreme events like hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, floods, and droughts that have all placed a larger burden on existing infrastructure systems. Improving infrastructure resilience to climate change requires both adaptation and mitigation strategies to cope with the short-term and long-term negative impacts of climate change. However, there has been a lack of integration of these two streams of research. Previous research has found that decision-makers lack analytical frameworks and tools to adequately consider all of the necessary components of infrastructure resilience. Specifically, climate change mitigation efforts have proven difficult to incorporate into disaster mitigation efforts. This Special Issue welcomes both conceptual and empirical contributions from all disciplines that may help to advance our knowledge on how to incorporate climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to improve infrastructure resilience and sustainability. We welcome studies on any of the key physical infrastructure sectors, including water, energy, food, sheltering, transportation, communications, sanitation, debris, waste management, and public spaces.

Submissions could relate, but are not limited, to the following topics:

  • Exploring multi-dimensions of infrastructure resilience and sustainability and their relationships;
  • Theoretical or analytical frameworks to integrate climate change mitigation and adaption in infrastructure planning;
  • Advancing the measurements to track infrastructure resilience and sustainability;
  • Innovative practices to integrate climate change mitigation and adaption in infrastructure management;
  • Challenges and strategies for improving infrastructure resilience and sustainability in rural communities;
  • Innovative applications using techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in improving infrastructure resilience and sustainability;
  • Resilience to compounded disasters (i.e., hurricanes and pandemics);
  • Challenges and strategies for improving infrastructure resilience and sustainability in underserved communities in urban settings.

Dr. Tian Tang
Dr. Eren Erman Ozguven
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • infrastructure resilience
  • sustainable infrastructure
  • climate change mitigation
  • climate change adaptation
  • resilience divide

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 2688 KiB  
Article
Exploring Environmental Impacts on HVAC Infrastructure Degradation Rate
by Timothy Frank, Josh Aldred, Justin White, Marcus Catchpole, Michelle Cabonce and Sophie Boulware
Sustainability 2024, 16(5), 1723; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16051723 - 20 Feb 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 747
Abstract
Environmental factors degrade civil infrastructure that is critical to humankind’s way of life. Sustainable asset management and capital allocation of infrastructure require an understanding of which factors most impact degradation. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system inspection records spanning 14 years from [...] Read more.
Environmental factors degrade civil infrastructure that is critical to humankind’s way of life. Sustainable asset management and capital allocation of infrastructure require an understanding of which factors most impact degradation. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system inspection records spanning 14 years from 49 locations across the USA were compiled and associated with the environmental conditions to which they were exposed. Nine environmental features were explored in this study: precipitation, minimum humidity, maximum humidity, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, wind speed, radiation, pH, and freeze–thaw cycles. Installation date, or age, was the lone nonenvironmental feature considered. Decreased precipitation, fewer freeze–thaw cycles and moderate temperatures led to lower degradation rates, while higher humidity led to higher degradation rates across the HVAC sections studied. Random forest models revealed that the most critical environmental features in predicting degradation rate were precipitation and radiation. However, feature importance varied in models that only considered subsets of the data based on either HVAC component type, initial condition of the HVAC section, or degradation rate. The results presented herein provide some insights into HVAC asset management, and the methodology used can be applied to other infrastructure systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reshaping Infrastructure for a Sustainable and Resilient Future)
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14 pages, 3161 KiB  
Communication
Improving Climate Resilience of Critical Assets: The ICARIA Project
by Beniamino Russo, Àlex de la Cruz Coronas, Mattia Leone, Barry Evans, Rita Salgado Brito, Denis Havlik, Marianne Bügelmayer-Blaschek, David Pacheco and Athanasios Sfetsos
Sustainability 2023, 15(19), 14090; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151914090 - 22 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3132
Abstract
The number of climate-related disasters has progressively increased in the last two decades and this trend will drastically exacerbate in the medium- and long-term horizons according to climate change projections. In this framework, through a multi-disciplinary team and a strong background acquired in [...] Read more.
The number of climate-related disasters has progressively increased in the last two decades and this trend will drastically exacerbate in the medium- and long-term horizons according to climate change projections. In this framework, through a multi-disciplinary team and a strong background acquired in recent projects, ICARIA aims to promote the use of asset-level modeling to achieve a better understanding of climate related tangible direct and indirect impacts on critical assets due to complex, cascading, and compound disasters. Furthermore, it takes into account the related risk reduction provided by suitable, sustainable, and cost-effective adaptation solutions. ICARIA focuses on both (i) critical assets and services that were not designed for potential climate change-related impacts that can increase the unplanned outages and failures, and (ii) on housing, natural areas, and population. Cutting edge methods regarding climate scenario building, asset-level-coupled models, and multi-risk assessment approaches will be implemented and replicated in three EU regions to understand how future climate scenarios might affect critical assets and to provide decision-making support tools to private and public risk owners to assess the costs and benefits of various adaptation solutions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reshaping Infrastructure for a Sustainable and Resilient Future)
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13 pages, 3860 KiB  
Article
The Role of Redundancy of Infrastructures on the Seismic Resilience (SR) of Sustainable Communities
by Davide Forcellini
Sustainability 2023, 15(15), 11849; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151511849 - 1 Aug 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1107
Abstract
Infrastructures are fundamental links in sustainable communities, and they need to remain at a level of functionality during and after natural events. In particular, assessing the seismic resilience of infrastructures has become an interesting topic in earthquake engineering. The estimation of indirect losses [...] Read more.
Infrastructures are fundamental links in sustainable communities, and they need to remain at a level of functionality during and after natural events. In particular, assessing the seismic resilience of infrastructures has become an interesting topic in earthquake engineering. The estimation of indirect losses due to seismic events is still a topic under discussion, especially for infrastructures. In this regard, the paper focused on including the level of redundancy inside an analytical formulation of the seismic resilience (SR). The main idea is to explore the possibility of alternative infrastructures that allow the circulation of services and people when the flow on the original infrastructure is interrupted or reduced. This goal is fundamental for preserving the resilience for sustainable communities. Therefore, the proposed formulation consists of considering the reduction in losses when the infrastructure is redundant by introducing the concept of the level of redundancy. In particular, indirect costs were herein defined with a new formulation that includes the level of redundancy inside the calculation of SR. The paper presented a case study that implements the formulation with the aim to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology. Several levels of infrastructural redundancy have been applied in the calculation of the SR of an infrastructure subjected to an ensemble of 100 seismic motions in order to scope the role of redundancy in improving the SR of the system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reshaping Infrastructure for a Sustainable and Resilient Future)
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