The paper, “From a Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing,” provides a summary of the risks encountered by the transportation networks because of natural hazards and climate change and how it results to disruptions affecting household and businesses directly and indirectly.
The paper gives a background material for the “Lifelines, The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity” report on infrastructure resilience and offers practical recommendations and solutions for building more resilience into transport infrastructures.
Many transport assets are exposed to natural hazards like floods and earthquakes because of its wide distributions and countries will need to spend between 0.5% to 3.3 per cent of their GDP annually or around the US $157 billion to $1 trillion in new transport infrastructure by 2030 and an additional of 1 to 2 per cent of GDP to maintain their network.
Transportation infrastructure such as roads and railways are the backbone of any growing economy. It provides access to work, schools, markets, a link from producers to consumers, and social services among many others. Thus, building resilience against natural disasters or extreme weather conditions is crucial to prevent any setbacks or disruptions.
Building resilient transport is creating reliable infrastructure, which is in line with the United Nations Development Goal 9 (SGD9) to “build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”. Especially in least developed countries where they need to improve and increase their contributions in manufacturing and investments in research (UN Sustainable Development, 2019).
The paper includes two main sections. First, it discusses how natural disasters are expensive for transport networks and their users. This section presents global estimates of multiple hazards and risk to road and rail infrastructures and its indirect costs to business and households.
Second, the paper discusses solutions for increasing transport network resilience through spatially target strengthening, good maintenance, priority investing, and working with nature.
It discusses how transport infrastructure resilience can positively impact users, food security, and supply chains.
Read the entire paper by clicking on the image below:
To use the sources presented in the blog post, please use these citations:
“Rozenberg, Julie; Espinet Alegre, Xavier; Avner, Paolo; Fox, Charles; Hallegatte, Stephane; Koks, Elco; Rentschler, Jun; Tariverdi, Mersedeh. 2019. From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing : Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters. Background paper for Lifelines;. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/31913 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Sustainable Development Goal 9 (2019). United Nations Sustainable Development Goads Knowledge Platform. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg9
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