Adapting Urban Rail Infrastructure to Climate Change

The aim of the project is to ensure a robust, safe and resilient railway in urban environments exposed to future climate change.

For urban planning, it is important to investigate “How climate changes might affect the future investment plans for construction, operation and maintenance for urban railway networks to ensure urban sustainable developments?” and “What will be the required policies and actions in design, construction, operation and maintenance to ensure robust and resilient operation to adapt with climate changes for short-and long-term scenarios?”, and “What are the expected challenges related business and governance for climate adaptation of built environment?”.
The aim of the project is to improve the resilience of urban railway infrastructure from adverse future climate conditions by implementing climate adaptation strategy in design, construction, operation, and maintenance. The aim will be achieved by developing a solution that integrates urban railway infrastructure features with climate change models and Satellite images and climate data. There is also a need to utilize new technologies, e.g., digitalization, and AI and satellite technologies to support urban planner and transport administration agencies to identify and implement required adaption planning for urban railway infrastructure.
This project addresses the following short-term targets:

• Better understanding of the climatic impact mechanism, causal relationship and trend projection of climate change for urban railway network.
• Developing resilient solution for urban railway infrastructure by integrating climate change model and satellite data in operation and maintenance plan.
• Developing cost benefit analyses for urban railway climate adaptation.
• Climate change risk and vulnerability analyses for urban railway network.
• Scale up the project and build project consortium internationally by collaborating with different countries and stakeholders to attract funding from EUs framework, Horizon Europe, etc.

The long-term effect of the project outcomes are:

• Facilitate awareness of climate change impacts and integrate developed solutions to facilitate finance and business models,
• Strengthen the research in sustainable built envir. at national and EU level,
• Strengthen collaboration among various urban planner, transport experts, and communities interested climate change impacts on citizen life,
• Improve the resilience of urban railway networks by climate adaptation.
• Facilitate modification and development of national policies and regulation.

The methodology implemented in the project can have significant impacts of more than 10% reduction in disruptions due to climate and 5-10 % operation and maintenance costs due to the early alarm system (exc. the second-hand societal cost).

Innovation potential

The project will develop an innovative platform and process that addresses to reduce impact of climate change on urban railway network (techniques, products and process in disruptive innovation).

The project will also deal with the incremental innovations to the

• existing infrastructure and construction strategies for urban railway network (infrastructure & production systems),
• rethinking of planning for future investments for implementation for climate adaptation (Business model / Value model) and
• revisiting the planning for change in policies and regulations (Policy & regulations)