Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

For decades, research has been highlighting the importance of making Canadian communities resilient to flooding, especially in the context of a changing climate. The concept of resilience can be defined in multiple ways, one of which proposes that: "The resilience of a system is the persistence of its functions and performances under uncertainty in the face of disturbances". All the research being conducted and the results reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports point to climate change as one of the main sources of uncertainty threatening the resilience of urban water infrastructure. Thus, there is a need to improve the climate resilience of our built environment, as well as to improve the new infrastructure design process. Design storms are hypothetical and standardized rainfall events used to test a given drainage design. However, these storms are not adapted for local studies, and they do not take into account the impact of climate change. Indeed, rainfall event intensity is projected to increase under a warmer climate, since it is widely accepted that for every 1 °C of temperature increase, a mass of air can contain an additional 7% of water vapour. Furthermore, it is expected that shorter duration and/or rarer storm events, used for the design of urban water infrastructure, will likely see larger relative increases in intensity. With respect to our built environment, green infrastructure, such as permeable pavements and rain gardens, are an alternative to common grey infrastructure, such as pipes and gutters. These green infrastructures aim to favour hydrological processes such as infiltration and evapotranspiration rather than conveying runoff water directly into the sewer system. While they have shown potential in terms of flood reduction, their maximum potential to mitigate the impact of climate change is yet to be investigated. This research program aims to improve climate resilience in urban water infrastructure by meeting the following objectives: ?Develop a methodology to generate new locally adapted design storm events. ?Quantify the impacts and uncertainty of climate change on design storms events. ?Evaluate the maximum potential of green infrastructure for urban flood reduction in a future climate. Overall, the main innovation of this research program will be to improve our knowledge on how to make urban water infrastructure more resilient to climate change, while providing engineers across Canada with tools to adapt their designs.