Addressing Climate Change in Transport

A global assessment of national road network vulnerability

“…Given the geographical constraints on increasing the redundancy of the road network in SIDS, the priority should be to strengthen the most critical road segments while increasing inter-modal redundancy around the most critical clusters of roads (for example with water or air transport) to ensure that evacuation and access to health centres is possible in the case of a natural hazard (Rentschler et al 2021, Petricola et al 2022. Similar results and recommendations are valid for mountainous countries that are constrained in the kilometres of all-weather roads that can be built at an affordable cost (Oh et al 2019). However, as raised by Wenz et al (2020) and Laurance and Arrea (2017), expanding infrastructure should be carefully considered in conjunction with its environmental impacts.…”

Advances in Climate Adaptation Modeling of Infrastructure Networks

“…Climate adaptation assessment involves the consideration of changing costs and benefits (avoided risks) over the life cycle of asset and network management. The costs over the lifetime include (Oh et al 2019;Pant et al 2019): (1) Initial investment costs of adaptation which are the one-time costs of a resilience option when it is implemented and (2) costs of routine maintenance (assumed to apply every year) and periodic maintenance (assumed to apply every few years) over the life cycle of the asset. To inform decision-makers on how to prioritize investment decisions for adaptation planning, a cost-benefit analysis is done to estimate network asset and location-specific benefit-cost ratios (BCR) that help identify for which options the avoided asset risks would be worth implementing (BCR ≥ 1) and which options would be more expensive than the avoided risks (BCR < 1).…”

“…Studies done with the World Bank in Tanzania (Pant et al 2018), Vietnam (Oh et al 2019), and Argentina (Pant et al 2019) on multi-modal transport networks have estimated risks due to failures of key network links exposed to one or more climate hazards (e.g. floods, cyclones, landslides).…”

“…Both studies highlighted that the transport networks in these countries were increasingly exposed to more severe and frequent extreme hazards, and their respective road networks would require significant investments to upgrade to higher climate-resilient design standards. In Vietnam estimates, it was suggested that adaptation investment costs of upgrading the 20 worst-impacted national roads would be high, but the cumulative benefits over 35 years of such investments were substantial, where for every 1 US$ invested in enhancing climate resilience, the benefits of avoiding risks would be equivalent to safeguarding US$ 7-23 of economic value associated with freight supply chains (Oh et al 2019). Similarly, in Argentina, for building resilience to flood risks, the costs of investments could be high, but the benefits of avoiding damages and disruption losses would outweigh the investment costs (Pant et al 2019).…”

“…Furthermore, the case for investing in climate resilience became stronger as the durations of disruptive impacts increased, which in turn meant that investing in reducing the duration of disruption should be a priority of adaptation planners in Argentina (Pant et al 2019). These studies are proving useful in providing scientific evidence to the transport ministries to develop a national strategy for climate-resilient transport and plans, as part of the transport sector's contribution to the Nationally Determined Contributions, to meet the Paris Climate Agreement targets (Oh et al 2019). The results of the analyses are also being provided as webbased tools for data inquiry and detailed network-scale climate risks and adaptation outcomes, which are integrated into the data analytic systems being used by the Ministry of Transport in Argentina (Pant et al 2019).…”