CESARE 2024 The 4th International Conference on Coordinating Engineering for Sustainability and Resilience

Field investigations after recent large earthquakes confirmed that several structures were severely damaged and collapsed not only due to the earthquake, but also due to the subsequent tsunami, landslide or fault displacement. In addition, several lessons have been learned about the importance of investigating individual structures from the perspective of ensuring network functionality. For example, the collapse of as-built bridges over highways prevented the passage of traffic. Even if the bridge is not damaged during the seismic event, damage to the embankment can significantly reduce the functionality of the road network after the disaster. A probabilistic life-cycle framework for quantifying the loss of functionality of road networks, including bridges and other road structures, is needed for the occurrence of a main shock and subsequent cascading hazard events. A risk-based decision-making approach at the network level is necessary for identifying the dominant hazard and the vulnerable structures that require strengthening and retrofitting.

After a catastrophic event, the functionality of transportation networks can be significantly degraded, resulting in disastrous economic impact. To quantify the promptness of the restoration, it has become customary to use the concept of resilience. In addition, the economic, environmental and social impacts of disaster waste management systems need to be investigated in terms of sustainability. Consequences associated with the resilience and sustainability must be studied and implemented into the risk estimation of road networks under multiple hazards. Life-cycle design and assessment methodologies can incorporate risk, resilience, sustainability, and multiple hazards, learning from the lessons of past disasters

Finally, the concepts and methods presented are illustrated using individual and spatially distributed structures

Climate change may significantly affect the health and safety of built environment. Constructions should be able to remain stable for their designed lifetime, from 50 to 100 years, even more.

As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events such as temperature, humidity, heavy rainfall, floods, and storms become more frequent and severe. These events pose a significant threat to conventional building designs and infrastructure. Consequently, there is a growing demand for climate-resilient construction that can withstand extreme weather conditions. Protecting infrastructure and buildings to cope with these threats is a complex challenge.

Building materials, design, and construction techniques need to be adapted to ensure the durability and safety of structures in the face of changing climatic conditions. The safety margins and robustness of constructions for undesired events in technical regulations and standards should therefore be continuously re-evaluated so that the designed level of reliability is maintained. To control by design, alternatively to traditional prescriptive design codes, where the building must conform to a set of given requirements that results in a hard-to-quantify performance, a Performance-Based Design (PBD) method might apply to explicitly define and achieve the desired structural performance.

Based on the review and analysis of dedicated literature and research reports related to this complex problem, potential technical solutions are discussed. Also, two real study cases, caused by extreme wind and snow, are presented.

Present circularity as a systemic and multidisciplinary approach highlighting its potential and limits for the decarbonization of the construction sector. The lecture will emphasize the different scales of application, tools, and circular business models that guide the circular transition of the built environment toward buildings as a material bank.