The Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) have united in claims the UK road network is not ready for climate change.
Progress in adapting to climate change, which was published at the end of April by the CCC, argued that extreme weather will increasingly disrupt key infrastructure.
While 'a third of railway and road kilometres are currently at flood risk' the CCC said this is predicted to rise to around half by 2050.
A table outlining the efforts made in preparing for climate change showed that ‘asset and system level reliability of both the strategic and local road network’ had seen limited progress.
The report stated that the Government should ‘ensure key regulated funding agreements provide incentives for adaptation deployment’, including the next Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) and the RIIO-3 price control final determinations.
It said: ‘The funding agreements should ensure that adaptation measures are deployed at-scale and for a broad range of climate hazards.’
CIHT noted that this echoed some of the concerns from its own report, Delivering a resilient transport network, which it published in October of last year. In this report, the CIHT called for:
1. Adaptation and resilience to be made an immediate investment and policy priority across all governmental transport strategies, as extreme weather events could mean significant and expensive infrastructure failures.
2. Mandatory assessments of the current and future resilience of the infrastructure.
3. The legislative road authorities of the UK to provide coherent and consistent guidance to the sector on how to undertake risk assessments on resilience.
Honorary fellow of CIHT, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, said: ‘We have seen in the last couple of years that the country is not prepared for the impacts of climate change. We know there is worse to come, and we are not ready – indeed in many areas we are not even planning to be ready.
‘Ineffective and outdated ways of working within Government are holding back the country’s ability to be future-fit. Is this Government going to face up to the reality of our situation? Failing to act will impact every family and every person in the country.’
CIHT added that it ‘looks forward to continuing to work with the Climate Change Committee and the government to ensure the UK’s transport networks are resilient in the face of climate change and increasingly adverse weather’.
Image credit: Shutterstock @Alasdair Jones
