Summary
Whether they are natural, manmade or a combination of the two, infrastructure projects for managing water resources are not always distributed evenly across time, space, or populations. Infrastructure managers bear a responsibility for ensuring all members of a community are being fairly served by infrastructure choices. To support sustainable nature-based solutions, these managers need a clear and concise set of guidelines for incorporating fair decision making into projects.
Approach and Deliverables
Our goal is to develop a set of operational actions that infrastructure managers can use to meaningfully incorporate fairness into water resources decisions. To investigate the latest science and practices for incorporating social systems factor into infrastructure decisions, we will interview infrastructure professionals and scholars working in this area and examine peer-reviewed literature and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studies where social concerns played a prominent role in decision making.
Based on our findings, we will create a framework that infrastructure managers can use for assessing community resilience in project planning. This decision framework will be published in an open access peer-reviewed journal and communicated widely through channels such as webinars and trade magazines.
Lead researcher
Don Nelson, University of Georgia, dnelson@uga.edu