Sustainability and Climate Resilience Trade-Offs in Transport Infrastructure Recovery

Abstract

Climate change exacerbates natural hazards and continuously challenges the performance of transport infrastructure. To avoid disruption, climate resilience and sustainable adaptation of infrastructure are of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a novel integrated framework and metrics for optimising climate resilience, sustainability and cost, to facilitate decision-making by operators and stakeholders and communicate actionable trade-offs between these principles. The framework describes the approach for quantifying ex-ante adaptation and post-ante recovery. It concludes with an application on a damaged bridge where normalised metrics are integrated into one unique index, which can be used in the recovery prioritisation. The impact of climate change on the sustainability and resilience indexes is examined and the results show how the optimum solutions are affected by different climate projections. In all cases examined, more sustainable solutions, leading to reduced tCO2e are the optimum solutions, when weighing resilience and cost.

Keywords: optimisation index, sustainability, climate change, Resilience, cost, recovery tCO2e