Many states, provinces, and municipalities are contemplating aggressive action to prevent damage from rising water levels and storm surge. However, given uncertainty in environmental trends, it can be difficult to know whether building a seawall, elevating structures, or taking other adaptation actions will be good investments. GEI provides specialized expertise in quantifying risks related to future hazard scenarios with and without implementation of effectively designed adaptation actions, then provides robust benefit-cost comparisons for stakeholders to evaluate.

Prior to taking adaptation actions, many jurisdictions and agencies wish to undertake detailed planning to quantify threats, appropriately engage stakeholders, understand policy requirements, identify and prioritize vulnerable assets, and articulate actions that may be cost-effective. At GEI, we have extensive experience with all aspects of this work at many levels of the public sector.

Many culverts and bridges face increased vulnerability because of sea level rise and extreme weather events. Effectively addressing these challenges often presents an up-front cost premium when compared to traditional methods of design. No agency or municipality can afford to address these vulnerabilities during all bridge and culvert replacements, so adapting effectively requires ranking risks to all structures to guide wise investments.

At GEI, we have worked with our clients to implement ranking systems for thousands of bridges and culverts. Once identified, the most vulnerable assets can then receive more careful design-threshold analysis given a range of future scenarios – this helps clients size structures so that money is not wasted on overbuilding and the asset is not left vulnerable to a changing environmental future.