Adaptation and resilience of the transport sector

Description

Climate change affects the European transport system in many ways and the impacts will differ across the world. It entails physical damage to transport infrastructure, more maintenance costs and more traffic disturbances and disruptions. For global logistics, climate change will increasingly affect routing, as well as where companies have their transport hubs.

From this large variety of impacts the ToPDAd research project selected four themes for analysis, guided by a broad review and stakeholder consultation. For each of the themes, ToPDAd assesses the effectiveness of various adaptation options, under various climate change scenarios. Adaptation in the transport sector does not only cover investments in infrastructure but also information provision and innovation. The latter options are usually cheaper than changes to infrastructure yet are useful as intermediary or complementary adaptation steps.

The first adaptation strategy ToPDAd considers is the provision of weather related travel information. Based on a case study of heavy precipitation and travel disruptions in Zurich, ToPDAd shows that travel information can reduce the costs of extreme events by up to one third by helping users to avoid congestion through a combination of choosing other routes or rescheduling activities.

The second study simulates a one-hundred year flooding in London under different climate scenarios and with different levels of damage, with the aim of comparing two possible adaptation strategies: establishing a fund to finance damage repair versus investment in flood defence systems like flood barriers. ToPDAd finds that a fund will speed up damage repair when the damage is limited. In case of big damage, however, a flood defence system is more cost-efficient.

A third study analyses what is the optimal timing for investing in the resilience of the transport infrastructure. The results shows that especially long lived infrastructure like bridges and railway lines, need to be climate-proofed already now.

The fourth study analyses whether the retreat of the sea ice cover in the Arctic could turn the North-East Passage or the so-called Northern Sea Route (NSR) into a competitive route for container shipping from Europe to Asia. ToPDAd concludes that by 2050 the NSR might take a small share of container shipping with mid-size container vessels, in combination with the Suez route. Yet there are important environmental concerns linked to this route.

Reference information