Climate change blog - building resilience: climate adaptation for our roads
Ann Carruthers, Director of Environment and Transport for Leicestershire County Council and ADEPT President 2024-2025 reflects on her presentation to the Climate Change Committee’s Citizens’ Panel on Climate Adaptation.
Earlier this month the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) Citizen’s Panel on Climate Adaptation brought around 30 panel members from devolved administrations to Manchester for a series of workshops.
The goal: to explore how our climate is impacting transport networks and asking the question “how can we respond?” My focus for the panel was the highways system, and during the event other colleagues also set out the picture for the rail sector.
The discussions were rich and wide ranging, and while this is early work to support the CCC’s more detailed advice and guidance for government, the event underlined the urgency of adapting our transport infrastructure to withstand an increasingly volatile and demanding climate.
A network under pressure
We know that the climate in the UK is changing, with winters becoming warmer and wetter, summers hotter and drier and severe rainfall instances much more intense when they do happen. What once were ‘exceptional’ weather events are now more frequent, often arriving in clusters that threaten to and in some cases do, overwhelm our rivers and drainage systems.
For roads the dangers, challenges and impacts are already obvious. Flooding makes routes impassable and damages carriageways and other infrastructure. In Leicestershire, storms across 2023 and 2024 left hundreds of properties and over 160 roads affected, with costs running into millions for emergency responses, drainage backlogs and clean-up works. Of course, these figures do not account for the far wider costs to the economy when people cannot travel to work or education or access essential services.
Extreme heat also brings its own complexities, and the 2022 heatwave saw road surface temperatures exceeding 60°C in parts of England, softening tarmac and leaving local authorities with repair bills of several million pounds. Rural and urban roads are often built to different standards, but neither are immune when we experience extreme conditions.
These consequences ripple outwards across all aspects of place, with blocked or damaged roads isolating communities, disrupting utilities and services and heightening safety concerns. Vulnerable people and more remote communities can be particularly exposed, due to the health impacts of more extreme weather and through reduced access to care, services and wider support because of travel and transport disruption.
The adaptation challenge
Responding to these pressures is not straightforward and the path is far from clear in many instances.
Repair and recovery costs are already high and rising and the Met Office projects that annual flood damage could increase from costing £2bn to around £3bn with just a 2°C temperature rise. We also face limits to what can be achieved because it is not practical or affordable to make the entire road network more resilient. Instead, we need to understand which connections are essential ‘lifelines’ and focus our finite resources there.
A variety of adaptation measures exist and are being trialled in some spaces. For flooding, these include better drainage systems, natural flood management schemes and sustainable urban drainage systems and working to build community resilience. To manage heat, solutions range from trialling new materials to reflective surfaces and roadside tree planting for shade as well as ‘dusting’ our roads during the hottest weather.
What was evident to the panel was that action is not keeping pace with the growing risks and the gap between climate impacts and our response is widening. This makes it essential to consider not only physical measures, but also how we build resilience into services and communities. Our goal must be to enable quicker responses and recovery when disruption occurs.
Shifting expectations
One theme that came through strongly in the discussions was the need to manage expectations. We cannot build or fund our way out of every challenge. Some parts of the network will inevitably be unavailable at times. The focus therefore must be on resilience, on having action plans for the ‘hotspots’ we know will be affected time and again, on how quickly can we recover and answering the question 'how do we prioritise the most important routes?'
Managing expectations also means changing community, public and individual perceptions. Severe weather events are becoming the norm, and communities will need to adjust to a lower level of certainty around access and travel and instead develop approaches for when we have disruption. Supporting this shift requires open conversations about the trade-offs involved.
Looking ahead
As with many challenges faced in local governance, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Local climate predictions, geography and the social and economic priorities of vastly differing communities all need to shape a wide range of potential responses.
We are still learning and more data is needed to assess and plan for risks. We will need to identify cost-effective interventions and seek to adopt innovation and technology where we can and make sure that any investment decisions work harder to respond to needs. Innovation is key, from new materials, design standards and technology to community-led initiatives that reduce reliance on transport during crises. New adaptation approaches will also mean accepting that certain roads cannot be maintained at all times.
We need to build communities that can withstand disruption and recover quickly whether through community schemes, local service provision or better digital access to services to reduce dependence on travel.
The CCC will be drawing together the evidence from this and other sessions to inform its recommendations to government. My key takeaway from the event was that we cannot delay, the risks are real and the impacts already being felt across our highway networks.
Adaptation requires a balanced approach including targeted investment, community resilience and an essential requirement to accept change. Collectively we must prepare now for the future demands on our highways infrastructure to ensure that our roads remain safe, reliable and resilient.
Further information
Author
- Ann Carruthers, ADEPT President 2024-2025 and Director of Environment and Transport for Leicestershire County Council
