Creating Climate-Resilient Urban Coasts with Natural and Hybrid Infrastructure
Dr. Navid Jafari

About the Webinar

Urban engineering solutions to mitigate intensifying coastal storms and rising sea levels historically relied on hard infrastructure. While they can be effective during extreme events, they are neither resilient to a changing climate nor sustainable due to costly long-term maintenance. By contrast, an emerging approach involves implementing natural and hybrid infrastructure, e.g., wetlands, vegetated dunes, barrier islands, mangroves, or in combination with hard structures. Natural infrastructure can not only promote sustainability of critical habitats but they also slow chronic coastline erosion, keep pace with sea level rise, and dampen storm surge and wave- driven processes. As a result, this seminar will delve into two examples of natural and hybrid infrastructure, elucidating geotechnical insights into their fundamental behavior and performance, respectively. The natural example probes into the root-soil strength of coastal wetlands and how their interplay with the ecogeomorphology controls their capacity to withstand storms. The hybrid example describes the performance of a breakwater and wetland hybrid system along a Chenier Plain from Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020. The presentation will conclude with an overview of lessons learned and future directions on the role of geotechnical engineering in creating sustainable and resilient urban coasts.

Presenter

Dr. Navid Jafari | Associate Professor Texas A&M University

Dr. Navid Jafari is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University. His research and teaching interests span terrestrial, coastal, and marine geotechnics, with specific focus on the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure to extreme events and a changing climate.