In assessing the impact of climate change on infrastructure, it is essential to consider the interactions between the atmosphere, vegetation and the near-surface soil. This paper presents an overview of these processes, focusing on recent advances from the literature and those made by members of COST Action TU1202 – Impacts of climate change on engineered slopes for infrastructure. Climate- and vegetation-driven processes (suction generation, erosion, desiccation cracking, freeze–thaw effects) are expected to change in incidence and severity, which will affect the stability of new and existing infrastructure slopes. This paper identifies the climate- and vegetation-driven processes that are of greatest concern, the suite of known unknowns that require further research, and lists key aspect that should be considered for the design of engineered transport infrastructure slopes in the context of climate change.

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This article presents a method of approximate finding of forces and strains resulting from the so-called membrane effect in the reinforcement of the transmission layer of embankments located on a soft soil improved by columns (rigid inclusions). The model task needed to determine the characteristic values in geosynthetic reinforcement supported on rigid columns was formulated. The reinforcement is treated as an isotropic membrane, in which the strains are determined using the formula for the length of the curve, i.e. it deviates from the assumptions of the small strain theory. Spatial problems are reduced to equivalent one-dimensional static tasks for analysis using the isotropic membrane theory. The closed form solution of this task exists only in the case of uniform load. For other types of loads, it is necessary to approximate the formula for the length of the curve occurring in the expression defining the strains in the membrane, e.g. using the Taylor series, and then solving the strongly non-linear equation in which the membrane tension force is unknown. The article presents the analysis of the effect of the length curve approximation with usage of the Taylor series on the accuracy of the results obtained. The presented analysis is very important from the point of view of standard engineering calculations needed to design the reinforcement of the transmission layer in the case of embankments located on soft soil reinforced with rigid inclusions.

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