Transport Resilience in the Face of Climate Change - SAR-CLIMATE

Transport Resilience in the Face of Climate Change

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In South Asia, road transport is key to enabling many aspects of economic life such as trade, public services delivery, governance, tourism, and other economic activities. Governments invest significantly in road infrastructure to provide connectivity to all economic zones primarily to reduce poverty and promote rural development. In brief, road infrastructure is a crucial catalyst of economic activity.

This requires more concerted efforts towards improving the current road infrastructure, especially in the geologically fragile mountain terrain of Nepal and in the flat terrain of Bangladesh, which is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as floods, storm surges and landslides caused by heavy rain and cyclones.

According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), resilient transport plays a critical role in the development of a country. While the transport sector can be affected by extreme climatic events, it is also one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Integrating economic, social and environmental aspects in transport policies, design, construction and maintenance can directly contribute to the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Temperature, wind speed and rainfall are major parameters that are significantly impacted by climate change. Decision-makers, designers and implementers are expected to enhance their knowledge about climate change impact on road infrastructure. This includes the understanding of the probability of occurrence and the planning, financing, design, construction, and maintenance of these roads in the future.

The CARE for South Asia project seeks to enable the relevant authorities to include climate change-related parameters while planning new and existing rural road infrastructure policies. The outcome related to the transport sector is to create an enabling environment for climate resilience policies and investments across South Asia with a particular focus on Bangladesh and Nepal.

The project will achieve these goals by enhancing regional cooperation and knowledge exchange through the mainstreaming of resilience and adaptation in national policies, plans, and investments. An improved access to and use of regional climate information, analytics, climate-sensitive policies, plans, and guidelines will help strengthen the transport sector’s resilience to climate change in Bangladesh and Nepal.

ADPC will work with the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), Bangladesh and other relevant agencies to develop and operationalize climate resilience strategies that are informed by the results of hazard, vulnerability, and risk assessment for road design.

The major challenge for the resilient road sector in Bangladesh is developing stakeholders’ capacity to absorb scientific information on climate change and improve construction standards. Moreover, stakeholders have expressed the need to improve existing design and construction standards for rural and strategic roads in the country. ADPC will provide technical support to upgrade these standards and build relevant government agencies’ capacities for implementing climate-risk management solutions.

In Nepal, ADPC will work with the Department of Roads (DOR) and other relevant agencies in developing evidence-based resilient policies, strategies and action/investment plans, informed by the results of hazard, vulnerability, and risk assessment. In particular, this will be achieved by integrating guidelines for resilient road networks, slope stabilization and protection designs in existing policies.

Furthermore, the project will help upgrade Nepal Roads Standards 2070 and Nepal Rural Roads Standards 2071 to make them more climate-resilient. In addition, the project will build the technical capacities of government officials on climate-resilience adaptive policy-making, design and solutions in the transport sector.

The writer is Resilient Infrastructure Specialist at ADPC.

Email: nurul.alam@adpc.net

About Post Author

paul

paul@abu.org.my

http://wpx2.abu.org.my/

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