Background/Objectives

Climate variability and change pose challenges for wastewater infrastructure, including from more severe (and, in many locales, more frequent) wet weather events, and from sea level rise. These challenges require wastewater infrastructure systems, and the state agencies that regulate them, to embrace both technological and organizational changes to adapt and build resilience. In the U.S. state of Rhode Island, the state’s Department of Environmental Management (RI DEM) has invested significant funding, capacity building, regulatory pressure, and other resources into helping the state’s public wastewater systems build resilience to climate challenges. We seek to characterize how transformative and proactive (particularly toward the long term) the results of these RI DEM efforts have been, and to understand why some public wastewater systems are more successful, transformative, or proactive in building resilience than others.

Approach/Activities

With RI DEM’s participation and assistance, we conducted event history calendar interviews with 48 wastewater superintendents/managers, operational staff, municipal officials, and other relevant stakeholders, from 18 of the 19 public wastewater systems in Rhode Island. The use of event history calendars as a research tool in wastewater systems is novel. In these interviews, event history calendars helped respondents recall details of events and activities from 2010 through early 2023, relevant to their history of resilience-building efforts. These events and activities spanned disruptive or potentially disruptive storms/incidents, large- and small-scale resilience-building activities, and new or improved information sources and collaborations, among others. Analysis of event history calendar data elucidates the development over time of capacities for both resilience and transformation.

Results/Lessons Learned

We find that transformative and resilient outcomes at wastewater utilities stem from the alignment of organizational cultures across the utility, municipal, and state levels of governance. To arrive at these results, we categorized each wastewater system, or case, at different points in time (within 2010-2023) by its level of transformative and proactive adaptive behaviors. In cases that have become more transformative and/or more proactive over time, we analyzed these changes across systems to identify what internal and external factors often caused and/or triggered these changes. Results suggest policies and decision-making strategies to support climate adaptation and resilience in socio-technical systems.