This dissertation is concerned with developing new methods for exploring the pressing problems of uncertainty, Environmental Justice, and tolling as they relate to long-range transportation planning. While these topics are seemingly disparate, much of the work in this dissertation is motivated by the increasing number of roadway projects concessioned to the private sector, and the lack of tools available for evaluating the impact of such agreements on the public given high levels of uncertainty over the length of the contracts and concern for the welfare of traditionally underserved population groups. These issues will be considered separately and together, offering insights into how transportation investment decisions can be improved. To this end, the impacts of considering long-range uncertainty in the traffic assignment model as well as in an integrated transportation and land use model (ITLUM) are assessed in terms of the effects on network performance measures and roadway improvement decisions. A new method for accounting for correlations between the future travel demands of origin-destination zone pairs is developed for the traffic assignment problem that can more effectively model the effects of potential economic changes. Results showed that neglecting correlations can lead to measures of variance of future total system travel time that range from underestimating the actual measure by seventy-five percent to overestimating it by one hundred percent, and to different selections for a network improvement project in up to fifty percent of all scenarios. Uncertainty in a basic ITLUM is considered more broadly, incorporating probability distributions for population and employment inputs as well as several travel demand model parameters, and examining how the choice of performance measure impacts the effect of uncertainty on the decision of where to increase system capacity. Comparing the network improvement projects selected when uncertainty is considered to a deterministic analysis, showed differences in up to 25% of scenarios. Challenges of considering Environmental Justice, a type of group-based equity that is required for metropolitan transportation plan compliance in the United States, are explored, particularly with regard to appropriately defining the term equity for the analysis. Several of these potential definitions are then transformed into objective functions for use in a new formulation of the user equilibrium-based discrete network design problem. A multi-objective genetic-algorithm solution method is developed to solve the problem efficiently, and insights are revealed into how different definitions of equity can lead to different decisions. The following objectives, both commonly used in practice, were found to be conflicting: 1) minimizing the difference in post-improvement performance across populations and 2) minimizing the difference across populations in the change in performance due to improvements. The problem of roadway tolling is first examined from the perspective of a private sector toll road operator seeking to maximize the asset's value by exercising flexibility. A stochastic recourse model is developed to account for the first stage investment decision and the second stage decisions to alter network capacity and toll rates. The flexibility to engage in non-compete clauses whereby the public sector cannot improve competing roadways, and also to improve feeder links in the surrounding network were found to play important roles in asset valuation. The value of having these options was found to increase with an increase in uncertainty of future demand, complexity of network structure, and the consequence of failure to meet debt obligations. The three original issues of uncertainty, Environmental Justice, and tolling are woven together into the development of a new method for determining the maximum toll rate that can be applied in a private sector operation scenario (first option) such that each group within the population, as defined for analysis of Environmental Justice, is no worse off than if the road had been constructed by the public sector without tolling (second option). Three stochastic dominance criteria are implemented to find the toll rate at which the first option dominates the second given uncertainty about the future travel demand. Findings suggest that there may be many toll rates that equate the benefits resulting from the two options, so the minimum rate is considered the optimal one. The difference in benefits to the groups was found to increase with increasing value of time, and the differences in optimal toll rates using each of the three dominance criteria increased similarly. The analytical tools developed in this dissertation, and the resulting insights obtained should offer significant contributions to several areas of long-range transportation planning, particularly informing the process of concessioning roadways to private entities, developing a transportation system that is robust to future uncertainty, and ensuring that Environmental Justice criteria is met by considering the transportation needs of each group within the population.

Infrastructure—electricity, telecommunications, roads, water, and sanitation—are central to people’s lives. Without it, they cannot make a living, stay healthy, and maintain a good quality of life. Access to basic infrastructure is also a key driver of economic development. This report lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience - the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural hazard. It focuses on four infrastructure systems that are essential to economic activity and people’s well-being: power systems, including the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity; water and sanitation—especially water utilities; transport systems—multiple modes such as road, rail, waterway, and airports, and multiple scales, including urban transit and rural access; and telecommunications, including telephone and Internet connections.

Flood Risk and Social Justice is a response to the rising significance of floods and flood-related disasters worldwide, as an initiative to promote a socially just approach to the problems of flood risk. It integrates the human-social and the technological components to provide a holistic view. This book treats flooding as a multi-dimensional human and natural world tragedy that must be accommodated using all the social and technological means that can be mobilised before, during and after the flooding event. It covers socially just flood risk mitigation practices which necessitate a wide range of multidisciplinary approaches, starting from social and wider environmental needs, including feedback cycles between human needs and technological means. Flood Risk and Social Justice looks at how to judge whether a risk is acceptable or not by addressing an understanding of social and phenomenological considerations rather than simple calculations of probabilities multiplied by unwanted outcomes and their balancing between costs and benefits. It is argued that the present ‘flood management’ practice should be largely replaced by the social justice approach where particular attention is given to deciding what is the right thing to do within a much wider context. Thus it insists upon the validity of modes of human understanding which cannot be addressed within the limited context of modern science. Flood Risk and Social Justice is written to support a wide range of audiences and seeks to improve the dialogue between researchers and practitioners from different disciplines (including post-graduate engineering, environmental and social science students, industry practitioners, academics, planners, environmental advocacy groups and environmental law professionals) who have a strong interest in a new kind of social justice work that can act as a continuous counter-balance to the various mechanisms that unceasingly give rise to profound injustices. More information about this book can be found in this article written for the WaterWiki by the author: http://www.iwawaterwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Articles/FloodRiskandSocialJustice Authors: Zoran Vojinovic is Associate Professor at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, the Netherlands, with almost 20 years of consulting and research experience in various aspects of water industry in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, Central/South America and the Caribbean. Michael B. Abbott is Emeritus Professor at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, the Netherlands, and a Director of the European Institute for Industrial Leadership in Brussels. He founded and developed the disciplines of Computational Hydraulics and Hydroinformatics and co-founded, the Journal of Hydroinformatics with Professor Roger Falconer.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker

In ten essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines consider such topics as the relationship between the two movements' ethical commitments and activist goals, instances of successful cooperation in U.S. contexts, and the challenges posed to both movements by globalisation and climate change.