Transportation Resilience Investment Planning Tool

South Asian countries economy will lose 1.8 percent of its annual GDP by 2050, rising to 8.8 percent by 2100, due to climate change and disruptions. The transport sector is one of the most affected and vulnerable sectors impacted by floods, landslides, temperature increases, sea level rise and other critical risks.

Responding to this need we delivered a tool that will assist decision-makers (initially in South Asian countries) to design transportation projects that enhance resilience to natural disasters while maximizing wider socio-economic benefits. The tool has been fully integrated in a GIS environment and is coupling network analyses with hazard and vulnerability assessments to estimate losses in terms of physical damages and user disruption (increased travel time) for numerous plausible events, thereby enabling the calculation of the region’s average annual loss due to flooding events. This subsequently allows the quantification of the benefit of investing in resilience through the estimation of annual loss reduction, attributable to adaptation measures of specific cost.

The tool also performs enhanced cost-benefit analyses to appraise the economic value of the investments and rank projects in terms of cost-efficiency. The tool has been applied in the three countries of interest and its results have been validated by the appropriate stakeholders.