Around the world, governments and transport leaders are attempting to increase transport resilience
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By Johnny Sharp
Surveys have estimated that 27 percent of global road and rail assets are currently exposed to natural hazards. An essential element in effective policies to guard against climate-related disruptions is the accurate assessment of vulnerabilities, and this is occurring all around the globe.
To secure service continuity in the summer of 2023, French state-owned train company SNCF Voyageurs drew up a resilience plan to deal with the risk of heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and act in anticipation. As well as increased maintenance schedules, online incident management has been enhanced, and employees have access to extreme heat protection equipment and adaptable outfits, while state-of-the-art reflective coating is being introduced on buildings and trains.
While it makes sense for at-risk areas to be robustly protected, there is also a need to manage any new development in regions such as floodplains, even though the land can sometimes be acquired at a lower price, precisely because of its problematic geography.
The US state of Virginia, where flooding is the most common and most costly natural disaster, now provides grants and loans to incentivise development projects that align with sustainable floodplain management standards. In December 2024. it also launched the Virginia Flood Protection Master Plan to promote awareness of, and plan for, flood-related dangers in the coming years.
An increasingly common way of assessing the resilience of transport systems is to model the potential impact of disruptions and assess potential recovery time. This type of process has been applied to bridges in Italy and container port terminals in Singapore, where the latter has helped to identify alternative combinations of quay and terminal equipment in case of events such as power loss and shutdown after earthquakes, typhoons or even terrorist attacks.
Elsewhere, Hong Kong’s Rail Infrastructure Flood Risk Assessment combines climate projections with detailed urban topography datasets to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the current and future flood risks faced by the city’s rail network.
Many cities around the world have introduced policies to introduce more green space, which could also play a key role in boosting resilience around heavily populated transport hubs.
Since the turn of the millennium in South Korea, numerous roadway flyovers have been replaced, such as the Cheonggyecheon expressway. This was demolished in 2003 and replaced with a 9km artificial river through the city, which has transformed nearby streets and even brought a 3.6C drop in average summer temperatures. More recently, the Seoullo 7017 Skygarden was opened in 2017, and its pedestrian thoroughfare has become a major tourist attraction.
Back in Europe, the Barcelona Nature Plan prioritises street-lining trees in the Catalan capital to mitigate extreme heat while promoting biodiversity across the city.
Meanwhile, in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2020, a canal that was concreted over to make way for a road in the 1970s was returned to its original purpose, as part of a plan to promote greater biodiversity and healthier living in the city.
One of the common problems found in developing efficient policies to promote resilience and sustainability strategies is the conflicting approaches of different government bodies or local authorities, and the lack of collaboration between them.
That was part of thinking behind Transport Canada’s move in late 2023 to establish a National Supply Chain Office, with a view to increasing efficiency and resiliency across supply chains, including mitigating impacts from disruptions, by promoting data sharing and fostering collaboration.
In Australia and New Zealand, the Austroads Guide to Road Design now accounts for the effects of climate on flooding and drainage systems.
Finally, the EU launched the Connecting Europe Facility in September 2024, calling for projects to modernise the transport infrastructure on the EU’s trans-European transport network (TEN-T).
CIHT’s National Conference is back and will be tacking the theme of the ‘Route to Net Zero’ and how to decarbonise our transport network.
>>> Discover more or book your tickets now.Image: people walk along the Seoullo 7017 Skygarden in Seoul, South Korea; credit: Shutterstock.
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