Leveraging socio-ecological resilience theory to build climate resilience in transport infrastructure

ABSTRACTAnthropogenic climate change poses risks to transport infrastructure that include disrupted operations, reduced lifespan and increased reconstruction and maintenance costs. Efforts to decrease the vulnerability of transport networks have been largely limited to understanding projected risks through governance and administrative efforts. Where physical adaptation measures have been implemented, these have typically aligned with a traditional “engineering resilience” approach of increasing the strength and rigidity of assets to withstand the impacts of climate change and maintain a stable operating state. Such systems have limited agility and are susceptible to failure from “surprise events”. Addressing these limitations, this paper considers an alternate approach to resilience, inspired by natural ecosystems that sense conditions in real-time, embrace multi-functionality and evolve in response to changing environmental conditions. Such systems embrace and thrive on unpredictability and instability....