Resilient and restorative: five lessons for transport’s climate adaptation

This summer brought record heat to the UK and the Met Office expects an increased chance of wetter, stormier conditions this autumn and winter, linked to the largest El Niño in living memory.

Owners and operators of ageing transport networks with tight funding envelopes know what this means for services, safety and public confidence. The ICE's first Resilient Transport Conference focused on how to respond.

Panellists and presenters from across transport agreed that climate change is already an operational and societal problem, and that nature is part of the solution. Our networks need to be resilient and restorative, keeping people moving and leaving places and nature better than they found them.

That aligns with the DfT’s Climate Adaptation Strategy for Transport, which late last year set out a vision for a system that continues to operate wherever possible, enabled by integrating climate resilience into decision making, sharing data to strengthen the evidence base, and taking a risk-based approach to prioritising investment.

Five lessons from the conference show how that vision can be put into practice. Several draw on work AtkinsRéalis presented on the day, delivered with clients including Transport Scotland, National Highways and Network Rail, alongside examples of our wider projects.

Count the true cost of disruption

Resilience is often appraised by what it costs to fix or adapt an asset, rather than the cost of that service or network not being available. The real cost falls on people and places, and business cases need to capture it.

Powys County Council’s climate risk assessment, which AtkinsRéalis supported, found that direct road-user costs were a fraction of the true impact. A closed road in rural Wales disrupts supply chains, tourism, access to work and healthcare, and the viability of whole communities. The work has moved into a feasibility phase on shortlisted sites, with a view to implementing and scaling up funding for flood solutions over the next five years, giving the council an evidence base to take to elected members.

Presenting at the conference, the Newcastle University-led DARe Hub found a similar pattern when comparing the actual maintenance regime for the Tyne Bridge with an ideal maintenance regime. While the direct financial impact was estimated at around £27m, the whole-life societal cost rose to around £158m once wider social and economic impacts were included. More than £130m of that total was attributable to disruption experienced by transport users, businesses and the wider economy, demonstrating that most of the cost fell on the people and places that depend on the asset, rather than the asset owner.

When appraisal reflects these costs, the case for investing before failure becomes clear. The Climate Change Committee estimates adaptation can return up to £10 for every £1 spent, with proactive maintenance giving the best return. As Nicola Bell, Chief Capital Officer at National Highways, put it at the conference, investing before failure is a “no-brainer”.

Manage risk across the system

Counting the full cost of disruption also shows that it rarely stays within one network. When adverse weather disrupts one part of the transport system, the pressure shifts onto another operator: rail delays push people into cars, and congestion pushes drivers from motorways and trunk roads onto local roads onto local roads, and vice versa.

Disruption dents public confidence in the whole system, particularly public transport. Risks between organisations matter as much as the risks within them and the challenge is how authorities work together to keep people and goods moving.

Transport Scotland shows how. For its first Trunk Road Adaptation Plan, we brought operators, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Network Rail and resilience specialists into one process. The resulting 45 actions cover governance and partnerships as well as infrastructure and form the basis of its plan for near, medium and long-term action.

England has taken a step in that direction with the recent memorandum of understanding between National Highways and Network Rail to strengthen collaboration in several areas. The agreement creates an opportunity to explore joint funding for climate adaptation and resilience across road and rail. This could go even further by bringing in local transport authorities and other infrastructure owners so that risk is managed across the whole system and, at the same time, moving us closer towards an integrated transport system.

Unlock private finance

Managing risk across boundaries raises a further question: who pays. Climate change doesn’t respect geographic or organisational boundaries. Overhauling entire ageing networks is prohibitively expensive, and the benefits are shared by people and places. Bringing those beneficiaries together can create an investable proposition that attracts private finance and costs each organisation less.

Landscape-scale flood solutions offer a potential route. With the Northeast Cotswold Farmer Cluster and Network Rail, AtkinsRéalis calculated the benefits of their Evenlode Landscape Recovery scheme to multiple beneficiaries, including water companies, transport and farmers. This created a business case for private investors to fund initial landscape recovery work and charge beneficiaries in the catchment a fee for continued management. It has led to a 20-year funding commitment from Defra and private investors, which Network Rail are taking forward.

What heals nature will heal transport, at a cost to each beneficiary far lower than if they tried to manage these challenges alone.

Target the interdependencies

Sharing costs depends on knowing where investment will do the most good. The conversation is moving on from where networks and assets are vulnerable to where an intervention can have the greatest impact.

Our work on National Highways' soft estate went beyond traditional asset risk analysis by considering how heat, flooding and drought affect vegetation, soils and habitats, and how those effects cascade into drainage performance, geotechnical assets, pavements and ultimately network performance – which is what operators are measured against.

Understanding those interdependencies revealed where investment delivers multiple resilience benefits. Managed effectively, the soft estate becomes part of the solution rather than a source of risk.

Repeatable frameworks

Understanding interdependencies only leads to improvement if it informs decisions. While data sharing is identified by DfT as an enabler of resilience, it only creates value only when translated into consistent decisions - requiring repeatable, auditable and transferable frameworks.

One example is the Ecosystem Valuation for Railways (ECOV4R) framework, the first global methodology designed to assess nature, resilience and wider social value impact of railway infrastructure. Developed by the International Union of Railways (UIC) in collaboration with railway infrastructure managers from across the world, it brings together habitat, GIS, operational and infrastructure data and translates them into a form that can support business cases, investment decisions and long-term asset management.

Applying this framework to the Evenlode scheme on the Cotswold line demonstrated that natural flood management interventions could deliver over £10m in avoided damages, providing carbon sequestration, biodiversity and wider social value benefits.

The result is not simply better data, but a shared understanding of where interventions can deliver the greatest value for assets, networks and the communities they serve.

Resilient and restorative

Together, these lessons point to what should come next. Following the Climate Adaptation Strategy for Transport, the DfT is due to publish a Resilient Transport Strategy. What we have learned as an industry should be at its centre: a place-based framework for prioritising investment that captures the true cost of disruption, targets critical interdependencies, enables nature-based solutions at scale and across institutional boundaries, and shares funding among the organisations and communities that benefit.