Understanding the impact of floods on critical infrastructure networks

Speaker: Yiyi He, Assistant Professor, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design, Georgia Tech

Abstract: Critical infrastructure networks provide socio-economic services across local and regional scales. However, population and economic growth, urbanization, increasing infrastructure interdependency, and natural hazards – not least due to the worsening effects of climate change – are putting these infrastructure systems under increasing pressure. Given future climatic variations, a comprehensive understanding of the potential impact of climate-change-induced natural hazards on the intra- and interconnected critical infrastructure networks and network resilience options is still absent. Through three types of infrastructure networks as case studies, this talk discusses approaches to better understand climate change impacts on critical infrastructure networks.

Bio: Yiyi He is an assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning (SCaRP) at the College of Design at Georgia Tech. Her research centers on the interdisciplinary fields of urban planning, GIScience, climate science, and artificial intelligence. She is interested in better understanding the uncertainty and asymmetric impacts of climate-change-induced extreme weather events (e.g., flooding, wildfires, extreme heat) on critical components of the built environment (e.g., lifeline infrastructure networks, vulnerable neighborhoods). She leverages data-driven approaches, such as GIS, network science, hyperspectral remote sensing, machine learning, and spatial statistics, to tackle complex challenges in climate change and resilience research and to inform more intelligent planning and policy directives. Her previous work involved using 3D hydrodynamic flood models to simulate flooding under different climate change scenarios and analyze the impact of coastal and inland flooding on critical infrastructure networks. She received her bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley.

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