UC helps nations plan for climate change

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wants to know how climate change will affect a proposed levee, it turns to University of Cincinnati professor Patrick Ray.

Ray, an assistant professor in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, is an expert in evaluating how water projects will stand up to flooding, drought or the other ravages of climate change. He rose to international prominence in 2015 after developing a new method to assess climate change risk for the World Bank Group, a lender that finances public infrastructure.

Today, Ray and his students are helping governments and development banks around the world gauge the risk from climate change for massive projects such as hydroelectric dams.

As a teenager, Ray worked on a reservoir project during a church trip to Zimbabwe.

“I knew that I wanted to be a water engineer and work in international development. You can see the difference these projects make. It’s profound,” Ray said.

Ray's projects demonstrate the impact the university's commitment to research is having in the world as part of UC's strategic direction called Next Lives Here.

Ray earned master’s and doctoral degrees in water resources engineering and studied water projects in Jordan as a Fulbright fellow. Later he worked on projects with the United Nations and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an  international development agency.

But, “it all comes down to mentors,” he said. “I had a good mentor.”

Ray got his big break when engineering professor Casey Brown at the University of Massachusetts asked him to draft a new climate change policy for the World Bank. Ray published his results in a 2015 book that now serves as a how-to manual for assessing the risk of climate change for planners around the world, from California to Mexico to Nepal.

“I had the technical skills, but I had never done something like this,” Ray said.

For generations, governments, banks and insurance companies would use historic data to gauge how a dam or water-retention pond would fare. If you knew that major flooding occurred about once every 100 years, you could plan your water project accordingly, Ray said.

But climate change has created chaos in these models. How can you know if a retention pond will fail in the face of unpredictable disasters like hurricanes or floods? Just in the past year, the United States witnessed the devastation of massive western wildfires, heat waves, a blizzard in the northeast and two catastrophic coastal storms, hurricanes Florence and Michael.

Ray literally wrote the book on climate change in risk assessment with his 125-page “Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design.” The World Bank provided $1 million in grants to develop the method and apply it to pilot projects in Nepal, Mexico City, Kenya and Indonesia.

“It was a new concept,” Ray said. “During the early 2010s, there were years of record-setting heat — perceivable change. Institutions such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank that build water infrastructure began taking climate change more seriously.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called Ray’s method a thoughtful and useful guidebook for water resources practitioners. The Center for Watershed Sciences in California said the book presents “a more understandable approach” to exploring the vulnerabilities of water projects.

Since its publication in 2015, Ray’s methods have been adopted by diverse planning and infrastructure agencies around the world.

The California Department of Water Resources turned to Ray last year for vulnerability assessments in its system that provides drinking water to 27 million Californians.

“Climate assessments typically go from top-down — a global climate model downsized to the region that is applied to a hydrological model and system model of the project,” said John Andrew, assistant deputy director for the California Department of Water Resources.

“But you can’t get any sense of likelihood or probability with that approach,” Andrew said. “The value of what Casey and Patrick developed is a bottom-up approach where you look at your system first. You stress test it to find out what the thresholds are where the performance breaks.”

Water is one of California’s most valuable and contentious resources. Being able to predict with some confidence how climate change could affect resources was critical to making smart decisions, Andrew said.

“We were very pleased with the results and partnership,” Andrew said. “We’re continuing to use that tool in other applications. We used it for the delivery and storage of water. We’re also interested in using it for flood management.”

How does Ray’s risk assessment system work? He describes it using a flow chart called a decision tree.

First, planners ask if a project is sensitive to climate change. If not, no further analysis is needed. But most water projects anywhere in the world are influenced by the climate. Phase 2 solicits basic information about the project, gathering local data to determine if climate is a dominant factor. If not, no more analysis is needed. But if climate is a potential issue, Phase 3 requires an exhaustive climate risk analysis using historical data and UC’s custom climate and hydrologic modeling techniques applied to the project’s infrastructure performance model and financial cost-benefit analysis.

Ray and his students then run these models using incremental climate variables within an informed range of possibility.

“They’re not random scenarios. We’re making them in intelligent ways,” Ray said. “We make smart climate models.”

The final phase examines whether a project like a culvert or retention pond will be able to cope with the most likely climate scenarios.

“Say you want to build a culvert, and it’s designed to handle anything up to a 10-year flood. So every 10 years or so it will fail, but it’s not a big deal if it overflows every 10 years. It would cost much more to build a bigger one. At the end of the day when the World Bank asks us if it’s a good idea or not, we describe for them the conditions under which it is and isn’t,” Ray said.

Now Ray is giving his students the same opportunities to influence major projects around the world.

“It’s the happiest thing in my life,” Ray said. “I am trying to reproduce what Casey did for me. Casey had me try this and, boom, it blew up my life.”

Featured image at top: UC engineering students Asphota Wasti, left, and Jacob Tracy work side by side in their computer lab in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. Photo/Joseph Fuqua II/UC Creative Services