An Insight into Climate Change-Related Geotechnical Uncertainty

Geotechnical engineering is migrating towards an increasingly data-centric and non-deterministic paradigm as reflected in the broadening corpus of research and in new design codes.Geotechnical research shows steady and significant progress in the development, implementation, and validation of non-deterministic approaches in which uncertainties are modelled, processed, and reported explicitly.The growing scientific consensus on the evidence of climate change and an enhanced global awareness regarding the importance of climate adaptation introduce a further dimension to non-deterministic geotechnical analysis and design. The effects of climate change signals on soilgeomechanical and geophysical properties is becoming a significant research topic. However, the consideration of uncertainties stemming from climate change-related phenomena is still not fully embedded in geotechnical design codes and is thus not conducted routinely in geotechnical practice. This paper aims to contribute to laying the groundwork for further research on the quantification and modeling of climate change-related uncertainties in geotechnical design and for a wider application to geotechnical practice. To these purposes, the paper provides a discursive structured insight into the nature and the current and future role of climate change-related uncertainty, briefly discusses its role in the ongoing evolution of design codes, and provides example literature references.

Keywords: Uncertainties, Climate change, Geotechnical design, Reliability, Geo-structures.