Findings and recommendations - TRB 290
Date: 2008-03-13
HOW WILL CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECT U.S. TRANSPORTATION?
Finding: Climate change will affect transportation primarily through increases in several types of weather and climate extremes, such as very hot days; intense precipitation events; intense hurricanes; drought;, and rising sea levels, coupled with storm surges and land subsidence. The impacts will vary by mode of transportation and region of the country, but they will be widespread and costly in both human and economic terms and will require significant changes in the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems.
Finding: Potentially, the greatest impact of climate change for North America�s transportation systems will be flooding of coastal roads, railways, transit systems, and runways because of global rising sea levels, coupled with storm surges and exacerbated in some locations by land subsidence.
Recommendation 1: Federal, state and local governments, in collaboration with owners and operators of infrastructure, such as ports and airports, and private railroad and pipeline companies, should inventory critical transportation infrastructure in light of climate change projections to determine whether, when, and where projected climate changes in their regions might be consequential.
HOW SHOULD TRANSPORTATION DECISION MAKERS RESPOND?
Finding: Public authorities and officials at various governmental levels and executives of private companies are continually making short- and long-term investment decisions that have implications for how the transportation system will respond to climate change in the near and long terms.
Recommendation 2: State and local governments and private infrastructure providers should incorporate climate change into their longterm capital improvement plans, facility designs, maintenance practices, operations, and emergency response plans.
Finding: The significant costs of redesigning and retrofitting transportation infrastructure to adapt to potential impacts of climate change suggest the need for more strategic, risk-based approaches to investment decisions.
Recommendation 3: Transportation planners and engineers should use more probabilistic investment analyses and design approaches that incorporate techniques for trading off the costs of making the infrastructure more robust against the economic costs of failure. At a more general level, these techniques could also be used to communicate these trade-offs to policy makers who make investment decisions and authorize funding.
WHAT DATA AND DECISION SUPPORT TOOLS ARE NEEDED?
Finding: Transportation professionals often lack sufficiently detailed information about expected climate changes and their timing to take appropriate action.
Recommendation 4: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT), the U.S. Geological Survey, and other relevant agencies should work together to institute a process for better communication among transportation professionals, climate scientists, and other relevant scientific disciplines, and establish a clearinghouse for transportation-relevant climate change information.
Finding: Better decision support tools are also needed to assist transportation decision makers.
Recommendation 5: Ongoing and planned research at federal and state agencies and universities that provide climate data and decision support tools should include the needs of transportation decision makers.
WHICH ADAPTATION STRATEGIES MAKE SENSE?
Operational Responses
Finding: Projected increases in extreme weather and climate underscore the importance of emergency response plans in vulnerable locations, and require that transportation providers work more closely with weather forecasters and emergency planners and assume a greater role in evacuation planning and emergency response.
Recommendation 6: Transportation agencies and service providers should build on the experience in those locations where transportation is well integrated into emergency response and evacuation plans. (best practices)
Monitoring and Use of Technology
Finding: Greater use of technology would enable infrastructure providers to monitor climate changes and receive advance warning of potential failures due to water levels and currents, wave action, winds, and temperatures exceeding what the infrastructure was designed to withstand.
Recommendation 7: Federal and academic research programs should encourage the development and implementation of monitoring technologies that could provide advance warning of pending failures due to the effects of weather and climate extremes on major transportation facilities.
Sharing of Best Practices
Finding: The geographic extent of the United States�from Alaska to Florida and from Maine to Hawaii�and its diversity of weather and climate conditions can provide a laboratory for identifying best practices and sharing information as the climate changes.
Recommendation 8: The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Federal Highway Administration, the Association of American Railroads, the American Public Transportation Association, the American Association of Port Authorities, the Airport Operators Council, associations for oil and gas pipelines, and other relevant transportation professional and research organizations should develop a mechanism to encourage sharing of best practices for addressing the potential impacts of climate change.
Design Changes
Finding: Reevaluating, developing, and regularly updating design standards for transportation infrastructure to address the impacts of climate change will require a broad-based research and testing program and a substantial implementation effort.
Recommendation 9: US DOT should take a leadership role, along with those professional organizations in the forefront of civil engineering practice across all modes, to initiate immediately a federally funded, multiagency research program for ongoing reevaluation of existing and development of new design standards as progress is made in understanding future climate conditions and the options available for addressing them. A research plan and cost proposal should be developed for submission to Congress for authorization and funding of this program.
Recommendation 10: In the short term, state and federally funded transportation infrastructure rehabilitation projects in highly vulnerable locations should be rebuilt to higher standards, and greater attention should be paid to the provision of redundant power and communications systems to ensure rapid restoration of transportation services in the event of failure.
Finding: Federal agencies have not focused generally on adaptation in addressing climate change.
Recommendation 11: US DOT should take the lead in developing an interagency working group focused on adaptation.
Transportation Planning and Land Use Controls
Finding: Transportation planners are not currently required to consider climate change impacts and their effects on infrastructure investments, particularly in vulnerable locations.
Recommendation 12: Federal planning regulations should require that climate change be included as a factor in the development of public-sector, long-range transportation plans; eliminate any perception that such plans should be limited to 20�30 years; and require collaboration in plan development with agencies responsible for land use, environmental protection, and natural resource management to foster more integrated transportation�land use decision making.
Finding: Locally controlled land use planning, which is typical throughout the country, has too limited a perspective to account for the broadly shared risks of climate change.
Insurance
Finding: The National Flood Insurance Program and the flood insurance rate maps (FIRMs) that determine program eligibility do not take climate change into account.
Recommendation 13: FEMA should reevaluate the risk reduction effectiveness of the National Flood Insurance Program and the FIRMs, particularly in view of projected increases in intense precipitation and storms. At a minimum, updated flood zone maps that account for sea level rise (incorporating land subsidence) should be a priority in coastal areas.
New Organizational Arrangements
Finding: Current institutional arrangements for transportation planning and operations were not organized to address climate change and may not be adequate for the purpose.
Recommendation 14: Incentives incorporated in federal and state legislation should be considered as a means of addressing and mitigating the impacts of climate change through regional and multistate efforts.
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