Transportation Infrastructure Risk Assessment on the context of Climate Change

Climate change poses a critical threat to the resilience and functionality of transportation infrastructure. Traditional risk assessments, often focused on physical losses and single assets, are inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected, and non-stationary nature of climate impacts on the transportation system. This necessitates a shift towards a holistic risk assessment framework. Such a framework moves beyond evaluating individual components like bridges or roads in isolation, instead considering the entire transportation system as a dynamic network. It employs high-resolution climate projections to understand future hazard exposure, including sea-level rise, extreme precipitation, and heatwaves, and conducts a multi-faceted vulnerability analysis that assesses not only physical susceptibility but also functional dependencies, operational capacity, and socioeconomic consequences of service disruption. Finally, it quantifies systemic risk by modeling cascading failures across the network, where damage to one node can propagate and cripple regional mobility and supply chains. This integrated framework enables policymakers and engineers to identify critical vulnerabilities, prioritize cost-effective adaptation investments, and enhance the long-term resilience of transportation infrastructure, ensuring its continued role in economic stability and societal well-being.

This webinar event is put on by the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering, which is based in UCL CEGE.

Speaker Information

Professor Saini Yang is the Executive Director of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) programme, co-sponsored by the International Science Council (ISC) and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). Dr. Saini Yang is a professor at Beijing Normal University, co-chair of UNESCO Chair Mountain Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience (MDR3), specializing in infrastructure risk analysis and climate change adaptation. She has led over twenty research projects as Principal Investigator and has authored more than 100 publications in leading journals such as Nature Climate Change and Nature Communications. She contributes her expertise as a member of the Expert Committee of China’s National Disaster Reduction Commission and the UN DRR Asia-Pacific Science and Technology Advisory Group, in addition to serving on the editorial boards of several international journals.