Risk Assessment of Road Infrastructures as Key for Adaptability Measures Selection

Road infrastructures are crucial for societies daily life due to the dependency of other critical infrastructures upon it. Therefore, society expects an uninterrupted availability of the road network. However, maintain this constant availability is often a difficult task as, in the last decades, climate change has significantly affected transport networks, especially due to the occurrence of extreme natural events leading to their disruption. Those events include floods, wild fires, landslides and others, and all of are varying both in frequency and intensity presently and in the coming years. Therefore, there is a clear need for timely adaptation. Regarding these adaptability measures, an important step is needed to quantify how the transport network is directly and indirectly affected by extreme weather events, which can be obtained within a risk assessment. Nonetheless, there are many questions and variability about this topic such as uncertainties in projections of future climate, cause-effects assessment, and how it can be an integration of all these aspects into a single decision-making process. In that scope, this work describes a risk assessment methodology having account the cause, effect, and consequences of extreme events in road networks to identify the major risks and therefore the assets that may be suitable to be analyzed within a selection of adaptation measures aiming at a holistic decision-making support tool.