Workshop Rationale

Projected population growth within the U.S. and worldwide over the next several decades will lead to demands for Earth resources, including habitable space, at unprecedented scales.  With this there will be an equally unprecedented need for strategies and technologies aimed at achieving the sustainable use of these resources — balancing utilization of resources and habitat with their protection and preservation for the long-term well-being of ecological systems and humans alike.

Increased demands for Earth resources — including habitable space — are likely to result in increased risk to physical and societal infrastructure, as humans increasingly occupy areas prone to the occurrence of natural high-energy, large scale or long-term potentially destructive processes such as landslides, seismic activity, flooding, coastal storm surges and land subsidence, particularly in coastal areas.  Moreover, assessments of risk must address not only the intersection of changing demographics and geological processes, but also effects of an evolving global climate on these processes and on anticipated social responses.

Such risks are inextricably tied to global and local geologic processes, and are in principle amenable to both risk assessment and prediction and to engineered mitigation and hazard reduction.  Their impact is likely to be felt by society as vulnerabilities and costs associated with the assurance of clean water, reliable communication, energy and transportation infrastructure, waste management and safe housing.  More mundane consequences of adverse ground conditions, such as foundation damage to buildings from geological processes associated with underlying karst conduits or foundation heave due to swelling clays, will also lead to escalating societal costs as humans inhabit less geologically suitable terrain.  Furthermore, beyond immediate questions of ensuring the future integrity of civil infrastructure and maintaining human health, principles of sustainable development call for a long term perspective on use of Earth resources, taking into account real costs and benefits, and respecting environmental limits.

These concerns fundamentally involve the intersection of engineering and the geosciences, and point clearly to the need to mesh existing knowledge and expertise of these disciplines in addressing questions of risk mitigation strategies and sustainability of future development, as well as the need to develop novel ways of thinking about complex systems, natural and engineered, and their coupled behavior over time scales ranging from minutes to decades and centuries.

A pressing need therefore exists to develop and strengthen cooperative cross-disciplinary efforts in the engineering and geoscience communities — efforts that are focused on: (i) collaborative research in key areas where advances and innovations will require the knowledge and perspectives of both disciplines; (ii) developing and improving educational alliances between these communities; and (iii) applying engineering and geoscience expertize jointly to problems of increasing societal importance and complexity, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

The workshop theme will center on assessments of process-driven system risk and reliability, including risk reduction and mitigation strategies.  Systems of interest involve both natural and designed components and may necessitate modeling of system behavior over time scales wherein engineering design lives approach the “deep” time of geological and geophysical processes.  By “process driven” we mean to aim beyond current approaches to assessment of system behavior that are based largely on extant physical and environmental conditions, and instead focus on next-generation methods and tools that assess active processes rather than current state, and incorporate dynamical modeling of relevant time-dependent physicochemical, geomechanical, geomorphological and geophysical processes to anticipate future behavior.

In addition, we envision “risk and reliability” as being applied to the health and functioning of environmental and ecological systems, as well as being applied in a conventional engineering sense to human and social risks and designed-system reliability.  We believe that these interwoven topics — assessment of process-driven risk, systems with both natural and designed components, time scales relevant in both engineering and geological contexts, and modeling of time-dependent system behavior — lend a natural overarching theme that will spark important exchanges between workshop participants in particular, and between the engineering and geoscience communities more generally.  We also believe that certain topical areas are poised to gain immediately from such exchanges, either because advances are likely to emerge directly from the joint expertise of the communities, or because these areas involve presently at-risk systems (e.g. coastal lands and wetlands).

Featured topical areas will emerge from discussions among participants during the workshop.  To provide initial focus in this process we will target the following for discussion:

• dynamics of unstable landforms in relation to risk assessment, transportation routing and land management practices
• karst processes in relation to subsidence, groundwater contamination and land use
• sediment transport, storage processes, and fate of sediments and sediment-borne substances in relation to river modification, restoration and management
• coastal and near-shore processes in relation to protection and management of coastal lands and wetlands
• emerging technological innovations, including remote sensing and in situ sensors, for monitoring environmental, ecological and geomechanical risk and remediation
• consequences of evolving global climate on environmental, ecological and geomechanical systems
• sustainable construction methods and material design, including natural materials and new special-purpose materials

The goal of the workshop will be to identify pressing needs and opportunities for collaborative research in areas such as those listed above, focusing on the theme of process-driven risk assessment and mitigation.  Towards this end, participants will be charged with: (i) identifying novel concepts pertaining to underlying processes, mathematical or computational models, or monitoring and instrumentation technologies (including remote sensing) that could improve next-generation risk assessment; (ii) identifying particular challenges to achieving advances in the understanding and prediction of at-risk systems; and (iii) identifying potential benefits to practicing engineers and to society deriving from collaborative research efforts.  Following the workshop we will produce a report summarizing these needs and opportunities, with recommendations for pursuing them.