TechBrief: Climate Change Adaptation for Pavements
Primary Topic: Sustainability
Description: Climate change can and is producing a wide array of impacts that affect infrastructure on a broad scale. An infrastructure asset's vulnerability to climate change is highly context sensitive, with its location and the adaptive capacity of local businesses, governments, and communities all being influential (EC 2013). Much has been written generally about climate change and its impacts on transportation systems, and literature is now emerging on how climate change specifically affects pavement systems and what adaptation strategies might be pursued. However, at the level of pavement systems, the state of the practice is largely limited to general observations and is lacking with regards to specific adaptation strategies. This Tech Brief provides an overview of climate change and pavement-specific impacts, and then addresses specific pavement adaptation strategies that can be implemented now and in the future.
FHWA Publication Number: FHWA-HIF-15-015
Publication Year: 2015
Document Links: PDF (file size: 3 mb)