Editorial: Special Issue on Climate Adaptation of Infrastructure Networks

Abstract

Climate change affects transportation infrastructures in different ways. Sea level rise and extreme weather may reduce the availability or the quality of parts of the network. Impacts may be felt by all modes of transport (e.g. roads, railroads, waterways, pipelines), by all transport motives (people, freight, utilities) and by different components of the system (the physical construction or user behaviour). Ultimately, failure of infrastructures can also occur at the system level, across modes, motives and components: infrastructures are connected and their performance is interdependent. On top of this wide variety of possible impacts of climate change, large uncertainties about the timing, intensity and location of effects also introduce the question of how to deal with uncertainty itself, in planning and design. This special issue deals with the identification of 1) of the expected impacts of climate change and 2) promising approaches to reduce its impacts.