Assessing Impacts of Climate Change & Infrastructure
Theme leaders: Charlotta Faith-Ell: WSP Civils/ Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, charlotta.faith-ell@wspgroup.se,
Jos Arts, Ministry of Transport, Public Works & Water Management, Delft/ University of Groningen, The Netherlands, jos.arts@rws.nl
Session 1 – A view of the current practice of impact assessment of climate change in infrastructure planning
Session Format: A presentation session with opportunities for delegates to ask questions and discuss the issues raised during the session.
Confirmed presentations:
- Assessing Impacts of Climate Change & Infrastructure - Introduction
Charlotta Faith-Ell & Jos Arts
Transportation is one of the main sources of CO2 emissions – or more broadly defined green house gas (GHG) emissions. This means that infrastructure planning has to deal with aspects of climate change. When discussing the issue of climate change in relation to infrastructure planning, there two main directions to consider: Mitigation and Adaptation. With mitigation we mean that infrastructure facilitates more (car)mobility that in turn creates CO2 emissions, which leads to climate change impacts. Also, recent studies show that the construction of infrastructure itself generates large amounts of green house gas emissions. Adaptation is the issue of how to adapt to changing weather and geophysical conditions as a result of climate change. Planning of infrastructure has to consider how to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Regarding impact assessment both temporal scale issues (short-, long-term) and spatial scale issues (local, global) are relevant. This relates to cumulative impacts of many small, local/regional projects at the bigger geographical scale as well as a life-cycle perspective. The latter is especially interesting for the Impact Assessment community: planning for climate change throughout the life-cycle of infrastructure development, which might link up with sustainability concepts like cradle-to-cradle. The issue of climate change has and will change how infrastructure is planned in the future. This means that the IA community need to ask the following questions: What is the role of IA? and What’s in it for us? The introduction paper introduces the theme of climate change and infrastructure.
- Towards a climate resilient society - tools for impact assessment of infrastructure and urban development
Berit Balfors & Ulla Mörtberg (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
During recent years, climate change aspects have received increased attention in urban planning and infrastructure development. In order to effectively address impacts on climate change and measures towards energy efficiency, a strategic approach in the planning process is required. To enable an early appraisal of alternative climate change adaptation scenarios, SEA could provide a suitable framework. The application of SEA in urban planning and infrastructure development entail various challenges so as to address e.g. cumulative impacts, transboundary and multi-scalar issues.
The incorporation of strategic issues related to climate change, call for analytical tools and methodological approaches that facilitate the planning and decision-making process. In this study we focus on the development of prediction tools and decision support systems in order to assist a comprehensive comparison of alternative strategies and identify innovative energy efficient solutions for a climate resilient society.
- Integration of climate change in the SEA of the Swedish National Transportation Plan
Michel Gabrielsson (Swedish Transport Administration)
The Swedish government amended the Swedish National Transportation Plan for the period 2010-2021 on the 29th March 2010. The planning process was accompanied by an SEA-process. One of the aspects that were investigated as likely significant in the SEA was climate change. This presentation aims at describing the process and challenges of integrating climate aspects in the National Transportation Plan.
Session 2 – Lessons from practice
Session Format: A presentation session with opportunities for delegates to ask questions and discuss the issues raised during the session. The session will end with a discussion with the participants that aims at summarising the conclusions from the two sessions.
Confirmed presentations:
- Integration of climate aspects in the Stockholm Bypass project
Marianne Klint (WSP Civils, Sweden)
The Stockholm Bypass is a new motorway west of Stockholm that has been under investigation for several decades and a large number of different alternatives have been studied. To reduce the impact on sensitive natural and cultural environments, just over 17 km of the total of 21 km of the motorway link are in tunnels. The construction work is planned to start in 2012 and it will take at least 8 years to finish. When the link opens for traffic it will be one of the longest road tunnels in the world. By 2035, the Swedish Transport Administration estimates that the Stockholm bypass will be used by approximately 140,000 vehicles per day. In the early planning stages the impacts to climate change was not considered at all but during the planning process the climate aspect has become one of the main aspects in the impact assessment. This presentation aims at describing the process and challenges of integrating climate aspects in the Stockholm Bypass project.
- Challenges in addressing the climate change issues within impact assessment practice of transport projects in Estonia.
Heikki Kalle (Hendrikson & Ko, Estonia)
Estonia faces challenges in defining long term goals in energy production that affect sustainable planning of transport infrastructure. As energy production questions are currently subjects of intense public debates the impact assessments are often in position where tradeoff situations between environmental values and their social costs are hard to solve. When transport plans are considered in strategical timescale the picture turns even more unclear and here emission levels of greenhouse gases often remain as only reliable yardstick for sustainability.
- Challenges in addressing climate change in IA of modal shift projects
Charlotta Faith-Ell (WSP Civils)
Modal shift is often suggested a way to reduce the impacts on climate change from infrastructure. However, modal shift is not the only solution to the aim of reducing GHG emissions since a transfer of traffic from one mode of transportation to another might give rise to other impacts for example increased noise in urban areas. This presentation builds on the experiences from an European project in which the potential to move 30 present of the European freight traffic from road to rail.
Session 3 - Ways to move forward
Session Format: A presentation session with opportunities for delegates to ask questions and discuss the issues raised during the session. The session will end with a discussion with the participants that aims at summarising the conclusions from the two sessions.
- Scope for Cost-Benefit Analysis in a Changing Environment of Climate Change and Infrastructure
Emile Dopheide (Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-information Management, University of Twente)
Despite its limitations and the critiques from various disciplines, including from the economic discipline itself, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a highly institutionalized tool in the assessment of infrastructure projects and other policy interventions. Given this strong role in decision making, we might expect cost-benefit analysis also to be widely applied in the decision making around climate change and infrastructure initiatives. The huge uncertainties around the scope and impact of climate change as well as the assumptions behind valuation and time preferences imposes a major challenge to the assessment of adaptation and mitigation measures. It seems therefore opportune to review the scope of the present and future use of an assessment tool as CBA in a changing environment of climate change and infrastructure.
Some fundamental issues concerning the use of economic approaches to assess climate control are being discussed by a paper by Baer and Spash (2008). In this paper we explore the possible function and contribution of CBA in the daily practice of the assessment of adaptation and mitigation measures and the areas where other complementary disciplines have to put their efforts to overcome the limitations and simplifications of the CBA assessment.
The presentation will be in first instance based on a recent round of interviews among academicians, professionals and policy makers about the use of CBA in infrastructure assessment over the last 10 years in the Netherlands. The respondents shed their light on the scope of the application of CBA for infrastructure assessment in general and identified a number of bottle-necks in the use of CBA in the assessment for decision-making. Critical issues (not unknown) that were repeatedly mentioned: the treatment of uncertainty towards decision-makers; the black-box character of CBA; the valuation of non-market effects; trade-offs over time (discounting); and the distribution among social groups. Also the lack of synchronization of CBA in the decision making process with other assessment frameworks (EIA, SEA) was repeatedly mentioned as an issue. Still, despite these persisting bottle-necks, most of the respondents fully favour the CBA framework as tool to assess societal welfare in its broadest sense and expect a growing demand for its application. So also in the assessment of adaptation and mitigation measures CBA will remain to play a major role. In view of the already identified bottle-necks of CBA, the application of CBA in the field of climate change and infrastructure might require an even more rigorous and critical use of CBA:
- Uncertainty about the exact magnitude and impact of climate change will increase the margins of uncertainty in the assessment;
- Major consequences of mitigation and adaptation measures on various stakeholder groups will ask for a more transparent presentation of CBA results
- Uncertainties within the climate change debate will impose limitations on the extent to value all the possible impacts in monetary terms
- Long-terms impacts, irreversibility and future generations are at the heart of the climate change debate and will have its implications for the practice of discounting
- Climate change and infrastructure interventions will have winners and loosers, who are often hidden within the CBA results
These questions will be further elaborated with examples and will eventually require a clearer positioning of CBA in the assessment framework, capitalizing its virtues and potential and recognizing its limitations. Some ideas about this position of CBA in a changing environment of climate change and infrastructure will be outlined and discussed.
- Assessing Climate Change Effects for Infrastructure Projects: What, How and When
Werenfried Spit (Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, The Netherlands)
The exact effects of the changing climate on infrastructure are still not known in detail. It is clear, however, that both higher temperatures and changes in precipitation can influence the optimal infrastructure design. In the Dutch context there is a strong relation with the water system. Changes in climate influence the system directly, through precipitation, and indirectly through sea, river and ground water levels. On the next level the water management and water safety programmes that are being designed to cope with these changes affect infrastructure planning and are affected by infrastructure planning.
In this complex situation we need to assess the effects of climate change on planned infrastructure. Our guideline is to have a smart assessment: we need the assessment to aid the decision process. This implies starting with rules of thumb, and progressing towards more detailed calculations in the decision process. We are designing new ways of risk analysis, with our EU neighbours, to specifically address climate change issues. Together with our water safety colleagues we are investigating both the exact relations between planned infrastructure and the climate and water systems, and the optimal way to address and assess these relations.