Equity considered infrastructure decision support for improved community resilience to natural hazards

The improvement of community resilience is critical to best prepare communities to face natural hazards which only continue to intensify in both occurrence and magnitude. Communities rely upon the critical services provided by our infrastructure systems (e.g., water, electric, etc.), and the provision or absence of service greatly dictates disaster impacts, functionality, and resilience across a community. However, when service outages do occur post-disaster, the impacts are disproportionately clustered among populations with vulnerable characteristics. These populations facing the most disproportionate impacts also tend to be serviced by more fragile infrastructure that is more prone to outages, which serves to increase the likelihood of these disproportionate impacts. If equity considerations, such as reducing these inequitable impacts, are not integrated into infrastructure decisions (e.g., retrofit, restoration) meant to improve community resilience, then infrastructure cannot be thought to equitably serve a community. A prime tenet of community resilience is the holistic support of the entire community rather than targeted support at an individual level. This therefore aligns the holistic reduction of inequity across a community as part of resilience. Additionally, both resilience and the civil engineering fields are recognizing the importance of including equity considerations in design decisions to better support the overall community and its resilience. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the integration of equity considerations into infrastructure decision-making so that community resilience can be best supported. Equity is not easily defined and as such this work first identifies five major equity dimensions: recognitional, distributional, restorative, procedural, and transgenerational. Equity is properly addressed when all five dimensions are integrated into decisions. The implementation of the equity dimensions for infrastructure are synthesized from existing disaster risk reduction frameworks, and recognitional and restorative are identified as dimensions of interest in this body of work. The integration of all dimensions exceeds a feasible scope of work. With defining the equity dimensions’ applications to infrastructure decision-making, existing infrastructure decision-making methods are classified into three primary groups: Single-Objective Single-Criteria, Single-Objective Multi-Criteria, and Multi-Objective Multi-Criteria and critically appraised for each dimension’s incorporation amenability. Multi-Objective Multi-Criteria is identified as the method with the greatest potential to support all equity dimensions. Recognitional equity is first investigated through the derivation of an infrastructure outage impact criticality analysis. By connecting social impact to the infrastructure system, impact disparities can be understood and represents a first step for social impact and equity considerations. Secondly, restorative equity is investigated for retrofit infrastructure decisions. To that end, a restorative equity metric is developed to prioritize impacts on systemically marginalized and vulnerable population subsets. This metric is primarily suited for applications where the decision is divided into two subgroups Thirdly, restorative equity is investigated for infrastructure restoration decisions by the derivation of an equity metric that accommodates larger number of subgroups required for network wide restoration decisions. This metric can also support retrofit decisions that occur at a higher resolution. By working to incorporate both recognitional and restorative (and ultimately all dimensions in future work) equity dimensions into infrastructure decision-making, the most vulnerable will be better supported to ultimately improve community resilience.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Civil Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Beck, Abigail Louise

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cha, Eun J
• Ouyang, Yanfeng
• Liao, Tim
• Peacock, Walter G

• Equity
• Infrastructure
• Decision Support
• Community Resilience
• Natural Hazards

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Abigail L. Beck

Language dc:language

eng, en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127445

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/127445