Introduction
Transport infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change and other natural or human caused disruptions. Maintaining an elevated infrastructure reliability and performance is crucial for increasing the resilience of the transport system. For example, low or excessive precipitations and extreme temperatures put a strain on transport infrastructure, lowering its performance and capacity, exacerbating its vulnerabilities and raising safety concerns. At the same time when focusing at a resilient and performing transport infrastructure its environmental footprint, resource and material consumption and habitat fragmentation and biodiversity degradation should be reduced to a minimum. The goal is smart, green, sustainable, climate-resilient and biodiversity friendly infrastructure.
Scope
– Ensure navigability for inland waterways by assuring at least 50% capacity during extreme weather events.
– Enhance land/sea/infrastructure resilience to extreme weather and human caused events by assuring at least 80% capacity at network level during the disruptions.
– Contribute with at least a 20% increase in modal shift to the sustainability of transport systems.
– Ensure resilience and smooth functioning of passenger mobility as well as freight transport and logistics networks operating on these infrastructures.
– Increase the use of recycled materials within or across transport modes by at least 30%.
– Reduce environmental impact (emissions, soil/water pollution, degradation of ecosystems and fragmentation of habitats) during construction, maintenance, operation and decommissioning of the infrastructure in line with the EU environmental legislation.
Objectives
– Solutions for ensuring the performance of inland waterways during periods of low or high water levels
– Solutions for ensuring the performance and safety of land transport infrastructure and ports during extreme weather and man-made events.
– Building on state-of-the-art solutions for surveillance and prediction of climate change effects, and identification of infrastructure points vulnerable to climate change.
– Design of standard, modular infrastructure elements for rapid deployment after disruptive events in order to increase the capacity of the transport network or create new provisional links as a temporary measure until the transport network recovers its normal capacity.
– Development of new governance models that enable cooperation across institutional, modal and national boundaries.
