Extreme weather events—including floods, heatwaves, and storms— can damage and disrupt transport infrastructure in a multitude of ways, leading to destructive and long-lasting consequences on people and the economy.
Because transportation assets, such as tunnels, tracks, and bridges, have design lives of several decades, it is imperative to consider future climate scenarios into their design and management to prevent unstable infrastructure or costly retrofitting.
Traditional adaptation planning, which frequently relies on cost-benefit analyses of individual, localized interventions, may no longer be sufficient.
The Framework for developing adaptation pathways for transport professionals released today by UNECE will address these concerns, providing guidance for infrastructure owners, operators, and managers to adapt their assets to future, and often unpredictable, climate conditions.
Adaptation Pathways Approach
Adaptation pathways can be described as a sequence of interlinked and flexible actions that can be progressively implemented, based on future dynamics and changes to risk, through early actions that do not compromise future actions and assist in providing overall adaptation to climate changes. (....)