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COLD REGIONS ENGINEERING IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Session: Keynote / Conférence Lukas U. Arenson, BGC Engineering Inc. (Canada) Considering climate change is an integral part of any infrastructure design that has an extended design life and of particular importance with respect to perpetual designs. Various technical guidelines indicate that global warming should be addressed in the design but often details on how to do this are missing. Also, climate projection models have seen significant improvement over recent years, but the biggest challenge in terms of designing for climate change are not changes in air temperature, but second and third order effects, together with changes in climate extremes. Non-linear changes in precipitation, adjustments in vegetation and/or related geohazards are of relevance rather than average changes in air temperature alone, which are typically the products with the lowest uncertainties available from climate projection models. The keynote presentation provides an overview of these challenges, a summary of latest climate change modeling products and introduces the use of a systematic, risk based approach for cold regions designs considering climate change.
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