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Recent devastating hurricanes demonstrated that extreme weather and climate change can jeopardize contaminated land remediation and harm public health and the environment. Since early 2016, the Sustainable Remediation Forum (SURF) has led research and organized knowledge exchanges to examine (1) the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on hazardous waste sites, and (2) how we can mitigate these impacts and create value for communities. The SURF team found that climate change and extreme weather events can undermine the effectiveness of the approved site remediation, and can also affect contaminant toxicity, exposure, organism sensitivity, fate and transport, long-term operations, management, and stewardship of remediation sites. Further, failure to consider social vulnerability to climate change could compromise remediation and adaptation strategies. SURF's recommendations for resilient remediation build on resources and drivers from state, national, and international sources, and marry the practices of sustainable remediation and climate change adaptation. They outline both general principles and site-specific protocols and provide global examples of mitigation and adaptation strategies. Opportunities for synergy include vulnerability assessments that benefit and build on established hazardous waste management law, policy, and practices. SURF's recommendations can guide owners and project managers in developing a site resiliency strategy. Resilient remediation can help expedite cleanup and redevelopment, decrease public health risks, and create jobs, parks, wetlands, and resilient energy sources. Resilient remediation and redevelopment can also positively contribute to achieving international goals for sustainable land management, climate action, clean energy, and sustainable cities.

Environmental remediation activities often require the management of large volumes of water and the consumption of significant amounts of local natural resources, including energy and fossil fuels. Traditionally, proposed remedial approaches for a specific cleanup scenario are evaluated by overall project implementation cost, time frame of the cleanup, and effectiveness to meet cleanup goals. A new paradigm shift, referred to as sustainable remediation, has influenced the remediation industry to consider environmental, social, and economic impacts from cleanup activities. An environmental footprint analysis is the most common method to evaluate environmental implications of cleanup approaches. Presently, these footprint tools do not associate the environmental implications with global impacts. In this article, the method has been extended to integrate the social cost of carbon emissions to quantify global impacts. The case study site is a former aircraft parts manufacturing facility that caused chlorinated solvent contamination in soil and groundwater beneath the building. A groundwater pump-and-treat system was initially installed, followed by its gradual phase-out with concurrent phase in of in situ bioremediation. The case study evaluates the monetized societal benefits from quantifying carbon emission impacts of the proposed cleanup approaches and alternative scenarios. Our results suggest that societal impacts based on monetized carbon emissions can be reduced by 27% by optimizing the remediation processes. The sensitivity analysis results elucidate how variation in carbon prices and social discount rates can influence cleanup decisions for remediation projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a methodology to calculate the social cost of sustainability metrics with environmental footprint evaluation tools. Measuring the impacts of a remediation project on society is challenging because the methods by which these impacts can be measured have not been established. To perform a complete sustainability assessment of a project's life cycle, costs borne by society in terms of environmental, economic, and community impacts must be evaluated. Two knowledge gaps have been identified among the sustainability assessments currently being performed during a remediation project's life cycle: (1) lack of methodologies available to evaluate impacts on the socioeconomic aspects of remediation and (2) lack of sustainability assessments conducted during the site characterization stage. Sustainability assessments were conducted on two case studies using the methodology proposed in this article: one during the site characterization stage and the other during remedial action. The results of this study demonstrated that costs borne by society from a remediation project are significant and metric specific. This study also highlighted the benefits of conducting a sustainability assessment at the site characterization stage using environmental footprint analysis tools, cost benefit analysis, and an evaluation of costs borne by society. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]