Quantifying the Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Hazards: Incorporating Disaster Mitigation Strategies in Climate Action Plans

Reconstruction after natural disasters can represent large peaks in a community’s greenhouse gas emission inventory. Components of the built environment destroyed by natural hazards have their useful life shortened, requiring replacement before functionally necessary. Though the hazard itself does not release greenhouse gasses, the demolition and rebuilding process does, and these are the emissions we can quantify to better understand the climate impacts of disasters. The proposed methodology draws data from existing emission and hazard resource literature and combines the information in a community scale life cycle assessment. Case studies of past disasters are used to refine the methodology and quantify the emissions of single events. The methodology is then annualized projecting the emissions of future hazards. The annualization of greenhouse gasses caused by hazard events provides a baseline from which reduction strategies can be measured against. Hazard mitigation strategies can then be quantified as greenhouse gas reduction strategies for use in Climate Action Plans. The methodology combines the fields of climate action, hazard mitigation, and climate adaptation. Each field attempts to create sustainable and resilient communities, but most plans silo each discipline, missing opportunities that are mutually beneficial. Quantifying the greenhouse gasses associated with recovery following a disaster blends these fields to allow development of comprehensive resilience and sustainability strategies that lower greenhouse gases and decrease risk from existing or projected hazards. An online supplement to this thesis is available online at disasterghg.wordpress.co

Methodologies for Simplified Lifeline System Risk Assessments

Natural hazards are a growing risk across the globe. As regions have urbanized, single events impact greater proportions of the population, and the populations within those regions have become more dependent on infrastructure systems. Regional resilience has become closely tied to the performance of infrastructure. For a comprehensive risk assessment losses caused by lifeline outage must be considered alongside structural and nonstructural risks. Many well developed techniques quantify structural and nonstructural risk; however, there are insufficient procedures to determine the likelihood of lifeline outages. Including lifelines in seismic assessments will provide a comprehensive risk, improving a decision maker’s capacity to efficiently balance mitigation against the full spectrum of risks. An ideal lifeline risk assessment is infeasible due to the large geographic scale of lifeline systems and their system structure; these same characteristics also make them vulnerable to disruption in hazard events. Probabilistic methods provide solutions for their analysis, but many of the necessary analysis variables remain unknown. Continued research and increased collection of infrastructure data may improve the ability of advanced probabilistic methods to study and forecast performance of lifelines, but many inputs for a complete probabilistic model are likely to remain unknown. This thesis recognizes these barriers to assessment and proposes a methodology that uses consequences to simplify analysis of lifeline systems. Risk is often defined as the product of probability of failure and consequence. Many assessments study the probability of failure and then consider the consequence. This thesis proposes the opposite, studying consequence first. In a theoretical model where all information is available the difference in approach is irrelevant; the results are the same regardless of order. In the real world however, studying consequence first provides an opportunity to simplify the system assessment. The proposed methodology starts with stakeholders defining consequences that constitute ruin, and then the lifeline system is examined and simplified to components that can produce such consequences. Previously large and expansive systems can be greatly simplified and made more approachable systems to study. The simplified methodology does not result in a comprehensive risk assessment, rather it provides an abbreviated risk profile of catastrophic risk; risk that constitutes ruin. By providing an assessment of only catastrophic lifeline risk, the risk of greatest importance is measured, while smaller recoverable risk remains unknown. This methodology aligns itself with the principle of resilience, the ability to withstand shocks and rebound. Assessments can be used directly to consider mitigation options that directly address stakeholder resilience. Many of the same probabilistic issues remain, but by simplifying the process, abbreviated lifelines assessments are more feasible providing stakeholders with information to make decisions in an environment that currently is largely unknown

Impact of Aerospace Technology on Future Ocean Systems

The ocean, like space, is a rather hostile environment but for different reasons; constraints of extreme pressure with depth, poor visibility and highly corrosive properties. Although submersibles have operated in this medium since the turn of the century, they have been operational essentially in the same limited plane as a surface vessel and use the ocean primarily as a covert cloak. Mission flexibility in using the third dimension (depth) has been constrained by stringent structural requirements. This presentation will discuss technological advancements required to make significant contributions to future ocean oriented commercial and military systems. There is not a direct transfusion of technology from outer to inner space but there are key areas where specific aerospace technology spin-off derivatives have merit. These will be addressed

Open space in human settlements : the lesson from the islamic tradition : contemporary design consideration from open spaces in Arab-Muslim human settlements in the Middle East

The pressure on the development of adequate open space systems in the Arab-Muslim countries in the Middle East is growing due to: massive migration to the cities, changes in the patterns of life and social networks, and an increasing growth in population. This process results in the development of new residential areas and the upgrading and redevelopment of existing residential quarters. Since modern western and traditional design approaches are often unsuited to the contemporary needs of the Arab-Muslims, these developments require a 'new' approach for the design of open space in these countries.To contribute to an appropriate contemporary open space design approach a series of design considerations is developed which might form a open space design language for settlements in the Arab-Muslim region in the Middle East.In order to derive this language the factors which affect the design of open space and the way modern open space has evolved from the traditional one, are described and analyzed. Attention is given to the application of traditional and modern design concepts, and the linkage of open space forms, layouts and functions of open spaces to life patterns, beliefs and desires in the context of their setting and the culture of the Arab-Muslim region in the Middle East.The author hopes that the results of this study may contribute to the 'dialogue' between users and open space, by which the establishment of meaningful and coherent open space systems is the main goal. A process which is, however, only achievable as both users, designers and decision-makers understand the language of open space