Using a three-year $600,000 grant from the Water Sustainability and Climate program, ASU engineers and sustainability scientists Mikhail Chester and Thomas Seager are leading a project that will provide a guide to boosting the resilience of infrastructure systems against potential threats posed by climatic changes.

Seager will work on developing one of the key methods the project team hopes will encourage foresight in policymaking and planning for these infrastructure networks. Using Arizona as a case study, Seager will devise a game-based learning platform – specifically a computer game – to educate leaders about possible future infrastructure vulnerability issues and how to approach the task of assessing what can be done to deal with them sooner rather than later.

The work based at ASU’s Sustainable Urban Systems Lab, which is directed by Chester, will focus primarily on desert regions because they are especially vulnerable to environmental impacts brought on by climate-related factors.