Planning to Build Resilience into Transportation Assets: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Although many state and local transportation agencies recognize the need to make transportation assets more resilient in the face of a changing climate, there have been few methods and best practices they can draw on to determine which assets may be compromised under future conditions and how to evaluate and select adaptation measures. Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Transportation Engineering Approaches to Climate Resiliency project sought to synthesize lessons learned and innovations from a variety of recent FHWA studies and pilots to help transportation agencies address changing climate conditions and extreme weather events at the asset level. This paper describes considerations for why, where, and how to integrate climate considerations into the project development process. It also discusses the types of climate information that should be considered, and summarizes lessons learned from FHWA’s studies and pilots—such as implementing adaptive designs, considering assets in a regional context, and exploring ecosystem-based adaptation solutions—that can be used to guide the process of developing adaptation strategies.