Climate effects on US infrastructure: the economics of adaptation for rail, roads, and coastal development

Abstract

Changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level, and coastal storms will likely increase the vulnerability of infrastructure across the USA. Using models that analyze vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation, this paper estimates impacts to railroad, roads, and coastal properties under three infrastructure management response scenarios: No Adaptation; Reactive Adaptation, and Proactive Adaptation. Comparing damages under each of these potential responses provides strong support for facilitating effective adaptation in these three sectors. Under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario and without adaptation, overall costs are projected to range in the $100s of billions annually by the end of this century. The first (reactive) tier of adaptation action, however, reduces costs by a factor of 10, and the second (proactive) tier reduces total costs across all three sectors to the low $10s of billions annually. For the rail and road sectors, estimated costs for Reactive and Proactive Adaptation scenarios capture a broader share of potential impacts, including selected indirect costs to rail and road users, and so are consistently about a factor of 2 higher than prior estimates. The results highlight the importance of considering climate risks in infrastructure planning and management.

Climate Change Impacts on Microbiota in Beach Sand and Water: Looking Ahead

“…Moreover, climate-induced increases in temperature, precipitation, sea level, and storm intensities worldwide will likely lead to more disasters and increases in human exposure to pathogens in waterways [12], increases in contact of humans and animals, as well as a greater prevalence of antibiotic and heavy metal resistant bacteria and fungi, primarily due to the greater runoff [97]. These costs are in addition to those required to maintain and enhance infrastructure in a changing environment [98,99].…”

Thresholds in Road Network Functioning on US Atlantic and Gulf Barrier Islands

“…Broadly, our findings contribute to a diverse and rapidly expanding body of work concerning climate-driven impacts to infrastructure (Faturechi and Miller-Hooks, 2015;Jaroszweski et al, 2014;Markolf et al, 2019;Neumann et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2020), and pertain to forward-looking discourse on sustainable urban systems, including calls for "developing new data and methods to understand current drivers and interactions among natural, human-built, and social systems in urban areas as they impact multiple sustainability outcomes across scales" (ACERE, 2018). Our work here is focused on barrier islands along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, but a similar effort could be applied to other low-lying coastal systems vulnerable to flooding, such as coral atolls (e.g., Storlazzi et al, 2018).…”

“…We also do not explicitly consider flood drivers or specific impacts of flooding (e.g., standing water, road damage, traffic flow, debris and sediment deposition), and instead focus on network disruption based purely on elevation. Future work can incorporate observations on how road networks are impacted by relative contributions of specific drivers from marine sources (Serafin et al., 2017) and others, such as pluvial (Dave et al., 2021; Evans et al., 2020; Kelleher & McPhillips, 2020; Neumann et al., 2021; Pregnolato et al., 2017) or groundwater flooding (Habel et al., 2020, 2017; Plane et al., 2019; Rotzoll & Fletcher, 2013), or the potential importance of variability in flood duration (Arrighi et al., 2021; Darestani et al., 2021; de Bruijn et al., 2019; Najibi & Devineni, 2018; Pezza & White, 2021; Sweet et al., 2014). Adding traffic dynamics either through graph‐based approaches (e.g., Dong et al., 2022), or agent‐based traffic simulations (e.g., Hummel et al., 2020; Papakonstantinou et al., 2019) would also enrich future work, as would further investigation of material and mechanical properties of roadways to understand the event conditions likely to cause permanent damage (e.g., Khan et al., 2014, 2017; Mallick et al., 2017).…”

“…Note that network analyses have also been variously applied to coastal morphology and dynamics in non‐built environments (Hiatt et al., 2021; Passalacqua, 2017; Pearson et al., 2020; Tejedor et al., 2018). Within the large and rapidly expanding body of research into climate‐driven disruptions to critical infrastructure (Faturechi & Miller‐Hooks, 2015; Jaroszweski et al., 2014; Markolf et al., 2019; Neumann et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2020), a subset is exploring specifically the exposure and susceptibility of infrastructure to different drivers of flood disturbance. In addition to graph‐based methods, recent work has focused on investigating disruption to road networks using techniques from agent‐based traffic simulation paired with hydrodynamic models of flooding, specifically to look at travel time delays (e.g., Hummel et al., 2020; Papakonstantinou et al., 2019).…”

“…In addition to graph‐based methods, recent work has focused on investigating disruption to road networks using techniques from agent‐based traffic simulation paired with hydrodynamic models of flooding, specifically to look at travel time delays (e.g., Hummel et al., 2020; Papakonstantinou et al., 2019). Studies consider road and other transportation networks in urban coastal settings (de Bruijn et al., 2019; Kasmalkar et al., 2020, 2021; Kermanshah & Derrible, 2017; Pezza & White, 2021; Plane et al., 2019; Rotzoll & Fletcher, 2013; Sadler et al., 2017; Suarez et al., 2005; Sweet et al., 2014) and in fluvial floodplains and upland catchments (Abdulla & Birgisson, 2021; Arrighi et al., 2021; Dave et al., 2021; Dong, Esmalian, et al., 2020; Dong et al., 2022; Evans et al., 2020; Hummel et al., 2020; Kelleher & McPhillips, 2020; Papakonstantinou et al., 2019; Pregnolato et al., 2017; Singh et al., 2018; Versini et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2019); others focus on water‐treatment systems in low‐lying coastal regions (Hummel et al., 2018) or multiple layers of infrastructure networks (Douglas et al., 2016; Habel et al., 2020, 2017; Koks et al., 2019; Neumann et al., 2021). To understand and forecast the future dynamics of developed barrier islands, more inquiry is needed to link thresholds in road network functioning to the physical forces that drive coastal change.…”