Geodesign Games for Adaptive Futures: Cocreating a Multi-Scalar Green, Blue, and Human Infrastructure Framework for Extreme Flooding Scenarios
Students: Walter Segovia, Abimbola Olodore, Alexandra Welsh, Reiss Pleasant, Roger Hill, Katelyn Roberson, and Madeleine Shay
Instructor: Hope Hui Rising
The eastern half the United States can be flooded by large tidal waves due to an overdue polar reversal as indicated by the rapidly weakening magnetic field. A weakening magnetic field makes the Earth more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme solar storms, which are likely to increase from now until 2025 to cause rapid sea level rise from ice-melting. Meanwhile, more intense and frequent storms are causing more dam-break-induced flooding. To facilitate more timely adaptive responses to these extreme flooding events, we conducted three geodesign games with stakeholders recruited by the Climate Adaptation Sciences Centers and the Texas General Land Office. The games resulted in consensus-based frameworks for siting adaptive blue, green and human infrastructure systems at varying scales from the continent, networks of water resources regions, to focus areas with priority intervention zones for emergency evacuation and proactive relocation of Texans within the impact zones.
This proposed multi-scalar green, blue, and human infrastructure framework aims to enhance community resilience to extreme flooding scenarios while promoting decarbonization, justice, and creation of high-paying jobs in several emerging green, blue, and space sectors. The framework intends to evacuate at-risk populations through integrating existing river systems as hovercraft routes, high speed railways, and air transit networks with roadways. In addition, the framework provides self-sufficient and radiation-proof evacuation hubs and relocation destinations with live-work communities and Civilian Climate Corps for job training and rehabilitation. Suitable evacuation hubs and relocation destinations are sited in proximity to Native American reservations to maximize the inclusion of Native Americans as instructors, trainees, and beneficiaries of employment and economic opportunities. The geodesign game outcomes also informs a multi-scalar habitat preservation framework to rehabilitate ecologically significant land managed by the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to facilitate climate migration of human and non-human species.
Project Statement:
This project is the first that uses geodesign to engage stakeholders from around the nation and Texas to cocreate a multi-scalar infrastructure framework plan to facilitate emergency response and managed retreat for extreme flooding events. This process of multi-scalar decision-making helps catalyze legislative actions at the state and federal level while initiating self-organizing local actions that are coherent with regional and continental consensus for green, blue, and human infrastructure systems that span across water resources regions, watersheds, and the urban-suburban-rural continuum within a watershed.