ID: 1485
Presenting Author: Christopher Davidson
Session: 686 - Climate Change Impact Assessment: Countering Misinformation with Science
Status: pending
Building from the cost impact on a single storm sewer system, this presentation looks at the importance of experts clearly communicating the cost of climate change.
Engineers and scientists are very aware of the cost of climate change in our respective fields, but we struggle to communicate those costs to a larger audience. This project looked at one particular cost of climate change (specifically, the present-day dollar cost of the installed stormwater pipes in the Mississauga, Ontario) and examined ways of expressing the impacts of climate change to those risks.
The cost implications of climate change on the Mississauga stormwater system were estimated by combining the spatial dataset for the storm sewer network (including length and size of stormwater pipes), the installed cost of various size stormwater pipes in the GTA, and the estimated increase in pipe sizes for each degree increase in air temperature. The results were then presented in a simple graph, and the project looks at other ways the impact of climate change can be communicated for a variety of other impacts (including shifts in ranges of native species, changes in flood risks, and water resource availability).
The underlying theme of the presentation is that engineers and scientists need to make these costs visible to non-engineers; not just for the sake of the larger debate on addressing climate change, but for how expressing that helps us personally.
Mr. Davidson is a Water Resources Engineer at WSP with 20+ years of experience, and is active with engineering outreach both in schools and online.