Developing Transportation Resilience Adaptively to Climate Change

Although definitions of resilience are wide-ranging, they ultimately aim to preserve functionality and performance during and after anticipated and unanticipated disruptions. Common themes for transportation system resilience include preparedness, robustness, response, and recovery. Adaptation is increasingly considered an important resilience ability for deeply uncertain conditions, and transformation an essential ability for sustainability. This paper discusses three factors that contribute to the development of resilience adaptively: (1) development of adaptive capabilities in an organization and its infrastructure systems to face known and unknown threats; (2) application of dynamic, adaptive, and robustness approaches in deeply uncertain conditions; and (3) mitigation of factors that cause or exacerbate unwanted disruptions to system function and performance—together with risk-based approaches to manage specific threats with well-understood likelihoods and consequences of occurrence. These factors enable an entity to adapt under deeply uncertain conditions—developing resilience as conditions change—and to adapt to curb the causes of disruptions. The benefits of developing resilience adaptively are to: enable the development of both threats-based and opportunities-based resilience; address deep uncertainties where it is impossible to quantify the chances and consequences of disruptions; and transition from merely managing symptoms to addressing the factors that cause, influence, or perpetuate them. These concepts are applied to develop an adaptive resilience improvement process for transportation agencies. This paper is potentially useful to practitioners interested in developing resilience adaptively and to researchers interested in risk-, adaptive and mitigation-based approaches to address known and unknown threats, for short- and long-term resilience gains.