Impacts of Climate Change and Adaptation on Road Infrastructure

Roads are essential for connecting people, goods, and places, serving as the foundation of modern infrastructure. From highways to small streets, they facilitate transportation, allowing individuals to commute, businesses to deliver products, and communities to stay connected.

However, climate change poses significant threats to roads worldwide, including rising temperatures, changes in precipitation and moisture levels, and increasing sea levels.

A review article titled “Climate change impacts on roadways“, published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment on 26 August 2025, outlined how man-made climate change will affect roadway infrastructure. The internationally co-authored review examines the impact of climate change on roads and then discusses potential adaptation strategies and transportation policies to address these issues.

Due to their constant exposure to natural elements, roads worldwide are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and sea level rise, which can cause significant damage, deterioration, and even shorten their lifespan.

Roads today are engineered to withstand expected environmental and traffic conditions based on historical data; however, they do not take into account the present and future extreme weather events due to climate change, such as heat waves, cold snaps, flooding, rising sea levels, higher average temperatures, and freeze-thaw cycles, all of which pose significant risks to roads.

As extreme weather events continues to pose risks to road infrastructures, the study explored the impacts of various climate change effects – high temperatures, precipitation and moisture, sea level rise, on different types of road pavements: gravel, asphalt, and concrete, and recommends various climate adaptation strategies to address them including changing the types of asphalt used, strengthen concrete with steel, stabilising gravel roads, and adding nature-based features.

When temperatures become too high, asphalt softens, leading to problems such as rutting. For every 1% increase in average temperature, rutting is expected to increase by 2%. Increased rainfall and sea level rise can weaken the soil under roads, reducing their lifespan by approximately half.

In the United States, the reconstruction cost of a single lane of road is estimated at US$304,565 per kilometre. Additionally, extreme weather can lead to road closures, traffic delays and detours, which contribute to economic losses.

By 2100, it is projected that high-tide flooding could lead to approximately 3.4 billion vehicle-hours of delays each year, and the cost of road maintenance due to climate change effects could be $500 million per year, depending on the country.

Jo Sias, the paper’s primary author, says, “Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing transportation infrastructure, and successfully building and maintaining resilient roadways into the future will require engineers, social scientists, planners, policy makers, and the general public to come together to find and implement equitable adaptation solutions”.

The paper notes that the climate change impacts on roads highlight the need for engineers, urban planners, and policymakers to have access to a range of climate adaptation strategies to address the problem. These strategies should also consider engineering, social, environmental, and economic factors.

Yet so far, efforts to account for climate change are not well connected, resulting in more road closures and construction delays.

The authors recommend the need to implement policies promptly, provide guidance on adapting roads, and conduct further exploration on the combined impacts of multiple climate stressors on roads.

Read the review article to learn more about climate change impacts on road pavements and potential climate adaptation approaches: Climate change impacts on roadways.