Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

The third, the uncertainty relating to the impact of weather events on the railway, will
need to be tackled through data collection and analysis as well as extensive stakeholder
engagement. The latter is of utmost importance due to the limitations of data in both
valuing all the potential impacts of weather events and assessing their relative
significance. Arup recommends that the baseline process should be heavily influenced
and guided by stakeholder consultation at all stages.
Finally, it is recognised that the T1009 Phase 2 project itself is advancing the
understanding and the methods available for effective economic appraisal of climate
change mitigations. In particular, the Task 3 (metrics) task is suggesting improvements to
the way that data is gathered (through use of ‘journey availability’, for example). The
Task 4 (systems) task suggested new boundaries for the appraisal process itself. These
were incorporated into the economics task as time progressed.
4.3 Task 1C Economics of climate change adaptation,
assessment of risk posed by climate change
Task 1C aimed to:
• Identify economic analysis and investment appraisal techniques used in the public
and private sectors
• Review the use of those appraisal techniques in relation to climate change adaptation
across infrastructure sectors and geographies
• Evaluate various appraisal tools in terms of their suitability for climate change
adaptation in the rail sector specifically
• Provide best practice examples which will feed into the provision of a framework
model of appraisal approach.
Many working in the area believe that traditional transport economic appraisal
methodologies are unable to adequately assess spending decisions related to adaptation
and resilience. In particular, they fail to capture many of the economic and social costs
of transport disruption due to extreme weather, and therefore the costs avoided by
adaptation action. The Brown Review (DfT, 2014) highlights these inadequacies and
recommends that the DfT works with transport operators to develop better
methodologies for the economic assessment of transport resilience actions.
There are many uncertainties involved in the appraisal of transport adaptation actions,
making the development of a comprehensive methodology challenging. It is difficult to
identify the probability of extreme weather occurring in a particular location. In
addition, the systemic nature of transport and the complex socio-economic
contributions it makes to society means that assessing the full consequences of
transport disruption is challenging. As a result, it is also difficult to assess the benefits of
improving resilience.
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