Addressing Transportation Agency Challenges in Improving Climate Resilience: Two Tools from FHWA

Transportation agencies are experiencing changes in extreme weather events, and will face increased climate and weather risks in the future, in the form of changing extreme precipitation, heat waves, sea level rise, and other stressors. Transportation agencies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to plan for the impacts of these changes, yet have struggled with how to do so in the face of uncertainty and finite resources. For example, acquiring and processing locally-relevant climate information has proved challenging. Participants in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Gulf Coast Study, Phase 2 have been working to understand and address the challenges that transportation agencies face in increasing their resilience to climate change. This paper focuses on two tools developed under this study that each address a major challenge that transportation agencies face in adapting to climate change. The first, the CMIP Climate Data Processing Tool, provides an easy way to gather and process downscaled climate model data, and “translates” that data into information relevant to transportation engineers and planners. The second tool, the Vulnerability Assessment Scoring Tool (VAST), provides a framework for assessing vulnerability in a transparent, cost-effective way. These tools significantly advance the state of the practice for transportation agencies to respond to climate change impacts, and beta-versions have been used successfully by several state DOTs and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). This paper presents information about these tools, examples of how they can be applied within transportation agencies, and areas for future research and development.