Climate Change and Research Challenges in Civil and Structural Engineering - Civil & Structural Engineering

Actually, research in civil and structural engineering needs more worldwide collaboration to find solutions for many challenges related to climate change. Particularly, efforts must be focused on the development of modern design codes based on reliability concepts, calibrated from quantitative risk analysis for adapting to, and mitigating the impacts of natural disasters such as storms, sever earthquakes, strong winds ...etc. These codes are the basis for engineering design and play an important role in decision making about the performance of structures over their working life. The consideration of reliability concepts in structural and geotechnical engineering is widely recognized because they are based on probability theory that enables the impact on safety and serviceability of uncertainties in both materials behavior and calculation models. Especially in the field of geotechnical engineering, the uncertainties in the soil properties are relatively high. Therefore, efficient probabilistic techniques are necessary to define reliability levels for structural design.  Current design codes, based on partial safety concepts, define the target reliability for different structures (onshore, offshore) depending on the desired safety levels, however worldwide research efforts and developments are needed for engineering practice of risk and reliability analysis. In addition, they should be calibrated and adapted to the actual environmental loading related to climate change.

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