Accelar & Ardent team up to help Sub-National Transport Body tackle corridor-scale climate resilience assessments
Swinging from heatwaves to extreme rainfall are examples of the more extreme weather events we will see as the climate continues to change. Climate change will continue to cause a wide range of impacts and consequences across society, infrastructure and the natural world. To deal with the change that is happening with our climate and weather it is imperative that organisations grasp the challenge of driving adaptation and resilience measures.
An example of media reports on the changing climate
Some of the largest impacts will be across infrastructure, causing disruption to the actual infrastructure and everything that connects with it, such as power networks. Disruption to one road network or rail corridor can have detrimental knock-on impacts, as can blackouts and technological failures.
Climate Resilience Assessment Process
In order to help assess the resilience of the road and rail transport network, we’ve been working with Midlands Connect, the Sub National Transport Body, to create a new Network Resilience to Climate Change assessment process. This process uses a combination of climate projections, measurable climate impacts, underlying datasets and GIS technology to provide mappable outputs of infrastructure risk to climate change. The process for creating this assessment is shown in the diagram.
The framework can be used across any road or rail corridor, or adapted to any asset, of any size and provides an output that indicates areas of vulnerability and areas of opportunity for resilience measures. This enables organisations to understand exactly where the climate risk lies across their network, and to also identify opportunities for collaboration and to strengthen interdependencies. Accelar utilised their climate and impact assessment expertise, supported by Ardent Management’s Atlas platform, producing interactive constraints applications to aid in visualizing the assessment across the Midlands Connect area.
The ability to combine datasets from various sources as well as introducing the framework data in an interactive and intuitive manner has provided the client with a powerful tool in conducting complex assessments. Layering constraints data onto key infrastructure information enabled Accelar to make an informed judgement backed up by a visual representation of the information. It also allowed for trends and patterns to emerge from datasets such as road traffic accidents the all fed directly into the final output.
This process helps to tackle a long-standing issue with climate resilience – how do you measure what is vulnerable, and how do you identify appropriate areas for adaptation? The assessment process can be applied at a road-by-road/ rail corridor scale, as well as at a regional level to provide some definition around relative risk within the area. If you’d like to learn more about the assessment process, or to chat to us about performing a climate resilience assessment, then please get in touch with Michael Smith at msmith@accelar.co.uk.