Implementing Climate Change Adaptation for European Road Administrations

International cooperation between national road owners can aid structuring and implementing climate change adaptation strategies throughout the European network. Climate change adaptation on roads can be defined as the concrete measures implemented to reduce vulnerability to more extreme weather phenomena in the future in order to increase resilience and robustness for continuous road safety and mobility. As evident in multiple scientific papers and authorities, such as the IPCC, climate change adaptation is gaining more general interest and political focus since actions of mitigation to climate change no longer seem to singlehandedly provide sufficient effect to future sustainable transportation on roads.As with actions related to mitigating climate change, allocating resources to climate change adaptation and successfully anchoring this subject in an organization, e.g. a national road authority (NRA), can be a highly demanding task which oftentimes can be overwhelming in its nature. Implementation of climate change R&D projects, alone, is a topic where interdisciplinary approaches are of high request, regularly resulting in time-consuming processes with many potential pitfalls, politically and technically.Therefore, the CEDR I4 group on mitigation and adapting to climate change has decided to have the following three topics as a combined objective to generate an outcome which will act as a template for organizations, e.g. NRAs, to initiate, develop, and/or complete climate change adaptation measures:
• Strategy and action plan
• Awareness
• Risk methodology approachThe strategy template will focus on managing, improving, preventing and cooperation, and will provide specific examples on areas to study. These include examples of information to road users, incident management, implementation through planning phases, tools for risk analyses, legislative work, research and information sharing and many others. Likewise, a template for an action plan is provided, giving examples on how to ensure responsibility and anchor climate change adaptation in the organization in order to actually direct the organization towards a more climate-resilient profile. The organizational awareness of climate change adaptation in an interdisciplinary context is considered undeniably crucial in this regard, since this will form the basis on how to act and prioritize resources. Examples of known methodologies of climate change adaptation will be highlighted to act as inspirational examples. As an example, such methodologies include risk mapping, e.g. the Blue Spot model or the Quick Scan approach.