The Resilience and Adaptation of Transport to Climate Change in the Mediterranean

Author:

Jordi Selfa Clemente

Senior Analyst, CETMO

Date: 07.11.2023

Reading: 10 min.

Introduction

Adaptation and mitigation are the two main responses to the challenges and threats posed by climate change. While mitigation actions can help reduce or eliminate anthropogenic drivers of global warming, the aim of adaptation actions is to increase resilience and reduce the vulnerability of people, activities and ecosystems to the effects of climate change. In the area of transport, some of the best examples of mitigation are the decarbonization of energy sources and measures to increase energy efficiency. The purpose of adapting transport to climate change is to protect infrastructure and operations from current and future effects of climate change.

Mitigation has featured prominently in recent years in transport policies, public debate and the agendas of financial institutions, whereas adaptation has played a less conspicuous role. This contrast between mitigation actions, identified adaptation needs, and actions actually implemented is known as the adaptation gap.

This article focuses on policies, strategies and tools aimed at climate change adaptation in the field of transport in the Mediterranean region. This geographic area is of particular relevance because it is expected to be one of the areas most affected by climate disruption (MEDECC, 2019). The challenge of adapting transport to the effects of climate change is yet another well-known inequality between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, at a time of great economic and political instability and uncertainty. Indeed, the Mediterranean is once again a sea that separates two areas with highly different capacities and resources for action, as well as a sea that unites territories affected by similar climate challenges, in which cooperation and the production and dissemination of knowledge are key in the move towards climate resilience and development.

Adaptation to Climate Change

When world leaders recognized the need to act on climate change, mitigation agreements were adopted to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It also became clear that human societies had to adapt. Specifically, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol acknowledged the need for action, especially in developing countries. The importance currently given to climate change adaptation is evident from its inclusion in Article 7 of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which states:

[…] Parties hereby establish the global goal on adaptation by enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change […].
Adaptation is a key component of the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems, […].
Parties recognize the importance of support for and international cooperation on adaptation efforts and the importance of taking into account the needs of developing country Parties, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. (United Nations, 2015)

Adaptation aims to guarantee resilience and reduce the vulnerability of human and natural systems to new climate scenarios. The consequences of these new scenarios can be classified in two categories: the effects of extreme weather events and the effects of gradual transformations such as rising sea levels.

In the definition of the Paris Agreement’s global goal on adaptation, the challenges posed by adapting to climate change are referred to as global, which is why international cooperation is so important, especially with regard to the most vulnerable countries. According to the Paris Agreement, special emphasis should be placed on generating and sharing knowledge and: “good practices, experiences and lessons learned, including, as appropriate, as these relate to science, planning, policies and implementation in relation to adaptation actions”.

However, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2022: Too Little, Too Slow (United Nations Environment Programme, 2022), the amount and rate of progress on global adaptation goals are insufficient. The report highlights international efforts on adaptation and states that 80% of countries have designed some form of climate change adaptation planning. In addition, it mentions a significant increase in funding in recent years. However, it also makes clear that the financial resources earmarked for this purpose are insufficient. According to the report, for the least developed countries to meet adaptation targets by 2030, five time more spending on adaptation would be necessary.

But the dangers and risks of climate change are now upon us, and damage and losses are only expected to increase in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, current implementation of adaptation measures does not mean that the risks and hazards will disappear. In many cases, these measures are carried out in an incremental, ad hoc manner without addressing the cascading, long-term effects, and are also implemented by shifting the problems in time and space. This has been referred to as maladaptation. Moreover, adaptation has its own limits. Some climate impacts are expected to be of such a magnitude that adaptation to produce only acceptable risks for society will be impossible. These hard limits of adaptation contrast with the soft limits, where risks can be kept at acceptable levels through adaptation measures. A port can take incremental measures against extreme sea level events, as long as such events remain within a certain recurrence or magnitude. In this case, port is facing soft limits. However, beyond certain levels of recurrence or magnitude of sea level rise events, there are no longer viable options for maintaining the operability under acceptable risks for society.

Today, the major challenges posed by climate change have prompted some experts to advocate the need to take urgent action to limit global warming and also implement adaptation measures. For example, the documents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and, in particular, its sixth report, published in 2022 (IPCC, 2022), which exerts considerable influence by calling for urgent action to maximize synergies between mitigation and adaptation measures with the ultimate goal of achieving climate-resilient development.

Transport and Climate Change Adaptation

Transport infrastructure and operations that ensure flows of goods and people must deal with the effects and impacts of climate change in the form of extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves, and as the result of long-term incremental changes, the most graphic example of which is the rise in sea levels. Impacts on the transport system can cause damage to infrastructure and render it unusable while seriously affecting transport operations. These one-off impacts can have a cascading, multiplier effect on whole supply chains and passenger mobility systems while distributing impacts on the transport sector to society as a whole. For example, recurrent extreme events, such as floods or long periods of drought, can cause land destabilisation and landslides. This could lead, even temporarily, to the disruption of communication routes, and thus the disruption of supply chains in larger areas than those affected directly by landslides. Finally, other impacts on the transport system cannot be ignored, such those resulting from changes in traffic flows due to climate change, as the distribution of tourist destinations and food production areas (UNECE, 2020).

Despite evidence of current and future impacts of climate change on transport, there is a lack of balance between the attention given to mitigation and adaptation policies. In transport, this adaptation gap is more evident due to the contrast between the work being done to decarbonize transport (which has become the top item on political agendas and in public debates) and adaptation policies and actions (which are less visible and more difficult to implement), among other factors, due to the lack of accurate knowledge of the specific effects and impacts of climate change on infrastructure and operations.

Based on the existence of this adaptation gap in transport policies and the general lack of knowledge on the effects and impacts of climate change on transport infrastructure, services and operations, two of the main recommendations for action have emerged from different areas. The first is to raise awareness of the need for action on climate change adaptation and the second focuses on generating specific, detailed knowledge on the impact of climate change on transport infrastructure and operations in different time frames and specific locations. It is clear that these two recommendations are closely linked. The need for action to adapt transport to the impacts of climate change should emerge from an understanding of the potential impact of future climate states on transport system components. This knowledge also involves production and dissemination work, as well as proper translation to different working scales. Successfully adapting transport to climate change will therefore require modelling future climate states, impacts and risks generated at different scales, and defining specific spatial and temporal measures to address them, as well as mechanisms for the dissemination of this knowledge to all actors in the transport sector.

A whole set of methods and guidelines are now available for assessing adaptation needs and developing measures that are easier to implement. Assessing the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities of transport infrastructure is the basic tool for identifying and adopting measures aimed at increasing the resilience of infrastructure for handling climate change. Along these lines, several specific methods have been published on the impacts of climate change on different types of transport modes ⁽¹⁾. In other cases, these methodological guides based on the assessment of infrastructure vulnerabilities are designed to be generic tools for funding programmes and specific policy development programmes.

Considering the interrelated effects on transport networks as a whole and, by extension, on society, there are calls for methods that go beyond the scale of specific projects and infrastructure and provide a more holistic view of the impacts of climate change. These methods include criticality analysis of infrastructure to assess the significance of the consequences of disruption for the system as a whole. Criticality analysis is not an alternative to vulnerability assessment, but it makes use of synergies as tools to move towards greater system resilience (UNECE, 2023a). The complex relationships between climate change and its consequences are not only unpredictable, but also introduce the difficulty of defining long-term strategies that take existing uncertainties into account. This leads to the need for new tools that help define the sequence of actions, as well as their adaptability and flexibility to new situations while considering the complexity of relationships between climate, human activities, and the natural environment (UNECE, 2023b).

Adaptation of Transport to Climate Change in the Mediterranean Region

In the context of adaptation to climate change, the Mediterranean region plays a critical role. The Mediterranean will be one of the areas where the effects of climate change are felt the most. This is reflected in IPCC6, which has a separate chapter on the Mediterranean region ⁽²⁾. Taking into account the biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea, the high population density on its shores, its capacity to attract tourists and its role in global supply chains, the so-called region will clearly be one of the areas where these effects have the greatest impact on natural systems and human activities. The response to climate change adaptation will undoubtedly be determined by the development and governance gap between societies on the northern and southern shores. Much of the northern shore is characterized by high levels of development and financial capacity. Furthermore, in terms of climate change adaptation, the existence of a governance system under the umbrella of the European Union should provide for the development of specific strategies, policies and measures aimed at adapting transport to the effects of climate change.

The countries on the southern shore must adapt transport to climate change with less capacity for action. This is due to lower levels of development, growing political and social instability, the lack of supranational structures that encourage the implementation of long-term regional strategies and measures, and climate change-related risks that directly affect priority systems such as food production and human settlements.

Back in 2013, the European Union established the first binding legislation for its Member States on the climate change adaptation strategy and, in 2014, the European Environment Agency published a guide on adapting transport to climate change (European Environment Agency, 2014). Moreover, the publication in 2019 of the European Green Deal (European Commission, 2019) marked the beginning of a whole set of initiatives on the challenge of climate change that currently provide the framework for the process of adapting transport to climate change in the European Union. The Green Deal addressed the need for a new climate change adaptation strategy in the communication Forging a Climate-Resilient Europe – The New EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change (European Comission, 2021a). With their specific focus on transport, the new Connecting Europe Facility (European Commission, 2021b) in 2021 and the proposal for new Guidelines for the Development of the Trans-European Transport Network (European Commission, 2021d) also address the issue of adaptation and resilience of infrastructure to climate change. From a more technical perspective, the Technical Guidance on Climate Proofing of Infrastructure for the Period 2021-2027 (European Commission, 2021c) stands out. These guidelines, prepared by the European Commission and the European Investment Bank Group, provide a guide for assessing the resilience of infrastructure projects to be financed in this period. Finally, the Directive on the Resilience of Critical Entities (European Commission, 2022) again stresses the need to consider the impacts of climate change.

In the deployment of European Union actions on adaptation, two goals are of note, among many others, which will have a particular impact in the Mediterranean region. The first is the importance of generating and disseminating knowledge on climate change, including its effects, impacts, measures and adaptation strategies. The second is recognizing that the effects of climate change are a challenge that extends beyond the borders of the European Union, which implies the need for collaboration with third countries in the adaptation process, including the need for climate funding. These two goals are relevant in the Mediterranean because they address two of the problems jointly faced by countries in that region, especially those on its southern shore.

Firstly, generating, disseminating, and exchanging knowledge is fundamental for proper design of adaptation strategies and measures. Knowledge on climate change in the Mediterranean must therefore provide all countries with information on future climate conditions and their evolution on a scale and with a resolution that facilitate decision-making. In this exchange of information, it is also important to remember that the countries on the southern shore have historically faced climatic situations like those expected to be faced by European countries in the near future, an experience that makes the mutual exchange of knowledge possible ⁽³⁾. Furthermore, the mobilization of financial resources by the European Union for adaptation to climate change in general and transport in particular in the countries on the southern shore is critical for societies with limited financial resources and immediate adaptation priorities to be addressed, in which adapting the transport system may be viewed more as a cost than a necessity.

Conclusion

Predicted impacts of climatic conditions in the Mediterranean basin threaten the ability of the transport system to continue performing its functions of ensuring the exchange of goods and mobility of people. Adaptation to new climatic conditions is a priority, as reflected in different national and supranational plans and strategies. However, the adaptation of transport in the Mediterranean is facing some challenges. First, the lack of precise knowledge about the effects of climate change and its evolution over time at required scales. Second, the lack of financial resources specifically devoted to transport adaptation, moreover when there exist other priorities in relation to climate change adaptation, such as food production. Third, the lack of a common governance structure that allows a common political and technical approach to common challenges in both side of the Mediterranean, as it exist in the European Union.

However, recognition of the fact that all countries in the Mediterranean region face the same climate challenges and that their transport systems are interdependent should lead to actions and measures that favour specific adaptation strategies and measures, particularly in the countries on the southern shore and especially when the European Union’s own adaptation goals include knowledge transfer and support for third countries. If these actions are not taken, there a risk that the transport system adaptation gap will be added to the list of the many existing inequalities between the two shores, and that more or less serious disruptions to the Mediterranean transport system as a whole will increase.

Bibliography

CEREMA (2019). Vulnérabilités et risques : les infrastructures de transport face au climat.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2019). The European Green Deal, Communication 2019/640.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2021a). Forging a Climate-Resilient Europe – The New EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change. Communication 2021/82.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2021b). Regulation Connecting Europe Facility. 2021/1153.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2021c). Technical Guidance on the Climate Proofing of Infrastructure in the Period 2021-2027. Commission Notice 2021/C 373/01.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2021d). Union Guidelines for the Development of the Trans-European Transport Network. Proposal for a Regulation 2021/0420

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2022). Directive on the Resilience of Critical Entities. Directive 2022/2557.

EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENT AGENCY (2014). Adaptation of transport to climate change in Europe. Challenges and options across transport modes and stakeholders. Luxembourg.

IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge.

MEDECC (2019). Risk associated to climate and environmental changes in the Mediterranean region.

UNITED NATIONS (2015). Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Paris.

UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME (2022). Adaptation Gap Report 2022: Too Little, Too Slow – Climate Adaptation Failure Puts World at Risk. Nairobi.

UNECE (2020). Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation for Transport Networks and Nodes. Geneva.

UNECE (2023a). Guidelines for integrating climate change considerations in planning and operational processes. Informal document. Geneva.

UNECE (2023b). Guidance on adaptation pathways for the transport sector. Informal document. Geneva.

Notes

Some examples of transport modes include:

UIC (2017). Rail Adapt. Paris.
PIANC (2020). Climate Change Adaptation Planning for Ports and Inland Waterways. Brussels.
PIARC (2019). Refinement of PIARC’s International Climate Change Adaptation Framework for Road Infrastructure. Paris.

On the effects of climate change in the Mediterranean, see also: MedECC (2019). Risk Associated to Climate and Environmental Changes in the Mediterranean Region.
It was therefore of interest to hold the conference for Mediterranean countries Raising Awareness on Adapting Transport Infrastructure to Climate Change and Setting up an Effective Intervention Programme, in Marseille on 15-16 May 2023, organized by UNECE, ESCWA, the French Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, Southern Region, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and CETMO.

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