Risk Assessment of Road Infrastructures as Key for Adaptability Measures Selection

Abstract

Road infrastructures are one of the most important assets in the world due to the dependency on other critical infrastructures upon it. Society expects an uninterrupted availability of the road network, nevertheless it has become a difficult task as, in the last decades, climate change has significantly affected transport networks, especially due to the occurrence of extreme natural events leading to the disruption of the network. Those events include floods, wild fires, landslides and others, and all of them may increase both in frequency and intensity in the coming century. Therefore, there is a clear need for timely adaptation. Regarding those adaptability measures, an important step is needed to quantify how the transport network is directly and indirectly affected by extreme weather events, which can be obtained within a risk assessment. Nonetheless, there are many questions and variability about this topic such as uncertainties in projections of future climate, effects assessment, and how it can be an integration of all these aspects into the decision-making process. In that scope, this work describes a risk assessment methodology having account the cause, effect, and consequence of extreme events in road networks to identify the major risks and therefore the assets that may be suitable to be analyzed within a selection of adaptation measures aiming at a holistic decision-making support tool.