Tomorrow's Railway and Climate Change Adaptation Final Report

However, as indicated by the DfT Infrastructure resilience review (2014), industries may
not have mutually compatible minimum-service-level asset management plans, or levels
of climate change susceptibility or impact across the entire infrastructure sector. It
would be prudent for the rail industry to consider joint research and development
opportunities to harmonise understanding and identify mutually critical zones of
interaction with the water, power, communications and gas sectors.
The DfT review of transport resilience (2014) makes further specific recommendations
to improve ‘systems of system’ approaches. These are:
• Recommendations 7, 16 and 43 (neighbouring land responsibilities and contact
checklists)
• Recommendations 11, 12, 33, 41, 44, 45 and 51 (enhanced forecasting for weather
and flooding, and collective improvements to shared infrastructure such as drainage
management, vegetation management and power supply).
Ideally, third party land and activities should be assessed continually to identify
emerging vulnerabilities and classify them in terms of their potential for causing
impacts. Mapping of information such as changes in land use or supporting third party
infrastructure could be integrated into asset surveys, or led from techniques such as
earth observation (e.g. laser/ radar scanning, photo/ scene comparison). Better spatial
understanding of third party land and operations is critical at local and operational
systems levels.
Similarly the Task 5A review highlighted the expectation that critical assets should be
identified across the rail network and their key dependencies. Critical nodes and
connecting systems could be elicited from route asset managers by expert knowledge,
or some form of spatially enabled network analysis/metric (e.g. graph-theory). This was
demonstrated by recent ITRC research strands concerning GIS as a tool for modelling
and visualising failure modes (http://www.itrc.org.uk/real-time-coupled-networkfailure-modelling-and-visualisation/
and
http://leeds.gisruk.org/abstracts/GISRUK2015_submission_30.pdf).
Task 5A further recommended prioritising these critical assets in terms of their climate
resilience. It also recommended that they should become a focus for funding of
resilience research/ mitigation, preferably in conjunction with other infrastructure
providers (identification of nationally important infrastructure networks). The DfT
review of transport resilience (2014) similarly recommended that the UK infrastructure
sector identified single points of failure (recommendation 4), appropriate indicators of
asset condition (recommendation 25), critical networks comprising routes of national
economic significance (recommendation 5), contingency plans to cope with extreme
events (recommendation 10, 35 and 45) and participation in wider cross-sector forums
(recommendation 17).
The Weather Resilience and Climate Chance Adaptation (WRACCA) reports, published by
the Network Rail routes during October 2014, highlighted that the process of route-level
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