Collaborative Research: Sustainable Water Infrastructure for Adapting to Coastal Climate Change

This collaborative project seeks to advance the sustainability and resilience of coastal communities against foreseeable impacts of climate change, such as intensified precipitation, sea-level rise (SLR), and SLR-driven groundwater rise. The central hypothesis is that sustainable and resilient infrastructure to manage water supply and flooding in coastal areas requires informed decisions aimed at (i) enhancing sustainability by balancing the local water budget through decentralization and (ii) enhancing resilience against compound flooding in which precipitation may coincide with other inundation sources.

Projections of SLR impacts increasingly will need to consider the flooding associated with the interconnections between SLR and shallow coastal aquifers, as well as expected compound flooding under typical precipitation events. Therefore, this project will establish a mechanistic framework to analyze important stressors to water infrastructure, with a focus on disadvantaged communities, and it will develop a decentralized model to enhance their sustainability and resilience.

The project aims to systematically understand the impacts of frequent and longer timescale flooding events on water infrastructure systems, and explore the sustainability benefits of decentralized infrastructure to mitigate the compound inundation impacts in which precipitation coincides with other inundation sources. The project team will employ a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique and couple it with distributed hydrologic modeling informed by groundwater table observations.

A comprehensive LCA framework will be informed by merging approaches from hydrology and data sciences to forecast the response of water infrastructure systems to future climate change stressors. Because the success of decentralized systems heavily relies on understanding barriers that communities face in system implementation and operation, this project seeks to advance sustainability assessment of infrastructure by incorporating the needs of communities.

Additionally, the project team aims to actively engage students from underrepresented groups through recruiting programs with Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) and the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) at San Diego State University (SDSU), an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). This project will train 1 PhD and 2 undergraduate students, each of which will be engaged in performing the project and presenting the outcomes to disseminate the knowledge.

The PhD student will be recruited to the Joint Doctoral Program (JDP) between SDSU and UCSD (University of California, San Diego) to be able to systematically benefit from the research, education and advising resources of the two institutions. Furthermore, the project will include K-12 student engagement, where the project team will deliver workshop modules on decentralized infrastructure for the SDSU Pre-College Institute’s STEM Exploration Day, an annual event for over350 underrepresented middle/high school students to engage with STEM disciplines.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.