The 190-mile stretch of US74 from Wilmington to Charlotte NC connects I-95 to the southeast part of the state, conveying goods, freight, and people. To increase resilience to climate change, the NCDOT contracted Atkins to assess future vulnerabilities and explore adaptation and mitigation options. Atkins used their City Simulator tool to create a corridor-wide digital twin and used it to simulate future growth and disasters from present day to mid-century. The team studied questions like where future flooding will be most damaging to infrastructure, productivity, and freight, sea-level rise impacts, how future climate may impact disadvantaged populations, and what actions will both save on system operation costs and reduce downtime. What problem did you solve using geodesign? - Determining where and when the US74 corridor is vulnerable to climate change, quantifying economic, social, and environment impact, and exploring solutions to become more resilient. What makes your geodesign work particularly unique? - An agent-based approach that simulates climate change impacts at the level of the corridor resident. What technology did you leverage in your geodesign work? - City Simulator is an extension of Esri’s ArcMap desktop tool. It leverages all the power of the GIS workbench, plus incorporates use of APIs to automate the heavy lifting of digital twin development. Further, we used Esri StoryMaps to convey the findings and details of the project to project stakeholders. How will sharing your work enhance the geodesign community? - This project is a illustrates geodesign at work, coming together over the digital map to discover the facts about resilience and make decisions based on them. What are your findings or results? - The project discovered hotspots across the corridor where concentrated improvement will help most. It found that hardening and elevating infrastructure should be the main ingredient in the resilience recipe, but that additional actions like increasing redundancy in the road system for disadvantage populations will have synergistic effects. How can this project be useful for the attendees? - Through City Simulator, this project takes GIS from static maps to a dynamic workbench that puts the map in motion, exposing options for improving resiliency and preparing for climate change.
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