“Today, the White House is convening the nation’s leading thinkers on infrastructure planning and design to highlight how projects like new roads and transit lines can be designed to foster economic opportunity and increase resilience to the impacts of climate change. To help communities seeking to expand their pipelines of well-designed projects, the Administration is also releasing a Federal Guide to Infrastructure Planning and Design. This community resource guide incorporates programs and opportunities from eight federal agencies and lays out a new set of principles to inform the work of local and State governments, public and private utilities, planners and other stakeholders around the U.S. The guide is part of the Build America Investment Initiative, an Administration-wide effort to help communities design and finance more and better infrastructure projects. As dozens of studies have suggested, the United States is currently underinvesting in our infrastructure by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And by 2045, our population will grow by 70 million people, and the demands on our infrastructure systems will grow in parallel. For example, we currently move more than 60 tons of freight per person per year – and by 2045, that will grow by 45 percent. But it’s not just population and economic growth that will put pressure on U.S. infrastructure. Climate change will also test the strength and endurance of the highways we drive on, the airports we fly out of, and the dams, reservoirs, canals and water facilities that provide water to our homes, businesses and farms. The National Association of Clean Water Agencies, for example, estimates that adaptation to climate change will cost water utilities between $500 billion and a $1 trillion over the next 35 years. Given such challenges, we need to be building smarter by anticipating future demands and integrating new technologies and design methods.”