I am pleased to welcome you to this, the October issue of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Transport. This themed issue focuses on environmental change and how this impacts the work of civil engineers.
Climate change is now an accepted fact. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has stated that man-made climate change is one of the greatest threats to the UK and the rest of the World (Dominiczak, 2014)
In July 2014, US President Obama announced a series of climate change initiatives aimed at guarding the electricity supply; improving local planning for flooding, coastal erosion and storm surges; and better predicting landslide risks as sea levels rise and storms and droughts intensify (Davenport, 2014).
Civil engineers have a major role to play in delivering studies, designs and projects to support these interventions. Furthermore, engineers also have an important role in identifying how accepted design standards need to adapt to suit the new ‘normal'. Once-in-a-hundred-year rain storms now appear to be less unusual than the name suggests and considering the long service lives of much of the infrastructure and buildings we construct, we need to anticipate what conditions they will face in 2050 or 2114. Where design is based on empirical data that has worked in the past we may need to reassess whether it will continue to work in the future.
Where the degree of change is less certain, a range of possible designs may be considered to determine sensitivity to change. We need either to make appropriate allowance for the anticipated changes or to build in flexibility, whether that be making it easy to modify the designs to evolve with those changes, or cheaper and easier to replace with something more suitable later.
The papers in this issue consider various aspects of the impact of climate change, beginning with Dijkstra et al. (2014) in which the Futurenet project to model resilience of the UK transport network is described. It is through such modelling that network vulnerabilities are identified and prioritised for action.
Network analysis has also been considered in the second paper (Fifer Bizjak et al., 2014), which examines the varying effects of climate change on pavement construction in Europe, depending on localised climate condition changes in each part of Europe.
In our third paper (Kramberger et al., 2014), a method of limiting the further generation of greenhouse gases is presented. The authors proposed that through better route planning fuel use will be reduced with associated cost savings and reduction of emissions.
Accurate data are needed to allow reductions in emissions to be assessed, and in our fourth paper (Zhou et al., 2014) an approach for collecting, quantifying, predicting and backcasting to assess carbon dioxide emissions in China enables informed policymaking.
The final three papers have a common theme of rainfall. Khan et al. (2014) present models that take account of flooding in analysis of road deterioration, predict pavement performance for different flooding probabilities and allow the selection of optimum treatment for post-flood rehabilitation for a specific road group.
Mashros and Ben-Edigbe (2014) describe the findings of a study based on the quality of highway service during rainfall and Yuan et al. (2014) consider the effects of rainfall intensity on the frequency and timing of traffic accidents.
By understanding the current circumstances and how they are impacted by change we can prioritise improvements while making new works less vulnerable to damage or early failure in service. Through holistic analysis of networks we can prioritise improvements to provide greater resilience before partial or complete system failure occurs. Through the collection and quantification of data, and the analysis and interpretation of those data, we are better able to make sound engineering decisions that will continue to meet the needs of users.
I trust you will find the papers in this issue informative and the editorial advisory panel would be pleased to receive details of how you are reducing, making allowance for and managing climate change in your projects.
The most recent articles are available to read ahead of print in the ICE Virtual Library (http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/serial/tran). This provides quicker access to fresh content. Other papers of interest for information on innovations and developments related to climate change are included in our sister publications including Civil Engineering, Urban Design and Planning, Water Management and Environmental Geotechnics.
