Integrating the Risk of Climate Change into Transportation Asset Management to Support Bridge Network-Level Decision-Making

Abstract

Climate change continues to cause frequent storms, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events, and these events are affecting transport infrastructure assets around the world. Despite broad recognition that climate change is a significant threat to infrastructure, the traditional asset management process does not explicitly consider it. The upshot is that asset management decisions, at the current time, may not be helping to reduce the risk of climate change–related infrastructure failure. This paper describes a step-by-step framework to integrate the risk of infrastructure failure due to climate change into transportation asset management (TAM) practices. This framework incorporates methods for risk assessment, needs estimation, and climate change scenario analyses that one can apply to the management of infrastructure assets. The paper also presents an example to quantify the risk of climate change–related bridge failure. This example demonstrates the applicability of the framework to infrastructure management decision support at the network level.