Climate change and road safety: A review to assess impacts in Malaysia

Abstract

Climate change is very likely to cause a sharp increase in temperature, which in turn is likely to affect atmospheric water storage, and thereby the magnitudes, frequencies and intensities of rainfall. The road environment, including the weather factors is one of the major causes of accident across the world. Therefore, it is very certain that climate change induced changes in weather factors will affect road safety, if proper adaptation measures are not taken. The major objective of this article is to review the existing literatures on the influence of climatic variables on road accident in order to assess the possible impacts of climate change on road safety in Malaysia. The analysis of exiting literatures reveals that most imminent and certain impacts of climate change on road safety will be due to increase of temperature and rainfall related extremes. However, the impacts may not be very high in Malaysia due to moderate changes of those extremes over a long time. Any potential risk would be possible to mitigate by educating the people on possible impacts of climatic extremes on road environment and motivating them to change their driving behaviour during extreme weather events.