Resilience of Transportation Systems Under Climate Change - Beyond Risk and Robustness
The long-term reliability and functioning of the transportation system will increasingly need to consider and plan for climate change and extreme weather events. Transportation systems have largely been designed and operated for historical climate conditions that are now frequently exceeded. Emerging knowledge of how to plan for climate change largely embraces risk-based thinking favoring more robust infrastructure designs. However, there remain questions about whether this approach is sufficient given the uncertainty and non-stationarity of the climate, and many other driving factors affecting transportation systems (e.g., funding, rapid technological change, population and utilization shifts, etc.). This paper examines the vulnerability of the transportation system to climate change and extreme weather events and finds that there are both direct and indirect “pathways of disruption.” Direct pathways of disruption consist of both abrupt impacts to physical infrastructure and impacts on non-physical factors such as human health, behavior, and decision making. Similarly, indirect pathways of disruption result from interconnectedness with other critical infrastructure and social systems. Currently, the direct pathways appear to receive considerably more focus and assessment than the indirect pathways, and the predominant approach for addressing these pathways of disruption emphasizes strengthening and armoring infrastructure (robustness) guided by risk analysis. However, the authors' analysis reveals that indirect pathways of disruption can have impacts that are on par with disruptions via direct pathways, while also being less amenable to risk/robustness-based approaches. As a result, they posit that concepts like flexibility and agility appear to be well suited to complement the status quo of robustness.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABR10 Standing Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Protection. Alternate title: Resilience of Transportation Systems Under Climate Change: Beyond Risk and Robustness
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Authors:
- Markolf, Samuel A
- Hoehne, Christopher
- Fraser, Andrew
- Chester, Mikhail V
- Underwood, B Shane
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
- Date: 2018
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: References; Tables;
- Pagination: 7p
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Climate change; Disaster resilience; Infrastructure; Literature reviews; Risk analysis; Risk assessment; Strategic planning; Transportation; Transportation planning; Uncertainty
- Uncontrolled Terms: Resilience (Adaptability); Robustness
- Subject Areas: Environment; Security and Emergencies; Society; Transportation (General);
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01661626
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 18-04703
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Feb 28 2018 5:01PM