Flooding in the Built Environment
Flooding in the Built Environment
Designing and building resilient infrastructure to meet climate challenges
Hampton Roads is already experiencing the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. Nuisance flooding threatens our built environment, particularly critical infrastructure like transportation, water and sewage systems. Through nature-based solutions for climate change, we have opportunities to change the way we design, build, and maintain infrastructure now to prepare us to be more resilient in the future.
ICAR researchers in the Flooding in the Built Environment program seek collaborations to seize adaptation opportunities across every sector of the built environment, from using real time road inundation image data to aid in regional traffic and emergency planning, to innovative adaptations within building architecture and natural landscaping to mitigate the effects of tidal flooding.
The Flooding in the Built Environment program seeks to
Innovate ways to communicate with residents in real time about hazards posed by both tidal flooding and coastal storms
Take the lead in developing adaptations through nature-based or hard infrastructure solutions, but also look for synergistic opportunities to improve our natural environment including quality of air, water, habitat, and be stewards of land resources
Help lead Hampton Roads communities to grow resilience through sustainable building practices for the construction and renovation of existing buildings
Advocate and act as a resource for updated building codes that incorporate future climate change impacts
Coordinate regionally with identifying vulnerabilities, interdependencies, capabilities, and cascading effects of sea level rise and recurrent flooding, helping to develop a ranking of resilience needs
Focus areas
Coastal Community Design Collaborative - a National Science Foundation-supported initiative bringing engineers and architects together to help solve sea level rise challenges
Develop a trans-disciplinary, collaborative design course series that includes professionals
Leverage new and existing surveillance equipment, so civil and environmental engineering researchers can create advanced systems to model, monitor and record road inundations due to recurrent flooding
Employ state-of-the-art hydrodynamic and hydrologic models to study the impacts of sea-level rise on transportation infrastructure in flood-prone areas of Norfolk
ICAR researchers created a 20-hour green infrastructure training course which was offered to veterans in Hampton Roads to educate them in green infrastructure practices and give them hands-on opportunities to install green infrastructure.
