With funding from the Caribbean Development Bank, IMC is developing guidelines to help the 19 Caribbean countries to incorporate climate change adaptation into road network planning, construction, budgeting and decision-making strategies.
Monday 09 April 2018, Private: Jonathan Essex
As hurricanes Irma and Maria have recently shown, the Caribbean is more and more vulnerable to natural hazards, which are heightened by the impacts of climate change. Suffice to say that 2017 was recorded as the most active season since 2005.
Only infrastructure that is resilient to natural disasters, including roads, can prevent climate change from jeopardising the investments these countries have made over the last few years. Historically, though, investment plans have not prioritised the resilience of existing roads, let alone their maintenance, which has resulted in both economic and human losses.
With funding from the Caribbean Development Bank, IMC is systematically analysing the region’s climate vulnerability and assessing risks to the transport sector in two countries, Guyana and Saint Lucia. In partnership with Acclimatise and Mona GeoInformatics Institute, we have developed a methodology and toolkit for identifying and prioritising investment to improve transport network resilience.
This will inform the guidelines that we are preparing to help the 19 Caribbean countries to incorporate climate change adaptation into road network planning, construction, budgeting and decision-making strategies.
The recommendations also aim to limit damage to existing transport infrastructure. This ranges from physical improvements in the most vulnerable locations, such as changing the design of drainage systems or increasing culvert sizes to reduce damage caused by flash floods, through to prioritisation of maintenance works before choosing to improve existing infrastructure.
We have built a prototype model in Saint Lucia, which we are testing, and will be further proven in Guyana. Our ultimate goal is to develop a toolkit and a wider approach which can be applied across all the 19 Caribbean countries by the project completion later this year.
To build the model, we mapped transport assets such as roads and bridges, and collected information on the natural hazards that could affect them. This considered both what has occurred in the past and what is anticipated in the future, including how disasters are impacted by climate change.
We have also mapped the importance of different roads, both economically and in terms of social vulnerability. This is vital, as research has shown that children, those with disability, women and the elderly are hit the hardest by disasters. Moreover, they are often less well equipped to cope with them.
These aspects, together with an evaluation of alternative routes, allows us to see, for example, which roads have a greatest socio-economic impact if they are damaged, so investments can be targeted to maximise resilience. For the first time, we are combining all this data into a central geospatial database.
We are developing the toolkit in a participatory way, including meetings with local communities, which allow them to share details about historic disaster events and help us to prioritise the major issues that affect them.
The scale of this assignment and its ambition has led us to address many challenges:
Bearing these points in mind, the toolkit aims to be methodologically sound while practically useful to guide decisions around current and future investments. By balancing vulnerability of different infrastructure assets and transport routes with their social and economic importance, this approach should help Caribbean governments to prioritise investments with limited budgets and reduce the vulnerability of infrastructure and communities to climate change.