Adapting Urban Rail Transport to Climate Change

Purpose and goal:

AdapUrbanRail aims to improve the resilience of urban railway infrastructure from adverse future climate conditions by implementing climate adaptation strategy in the asset´s entire life cycle. The objective is to develop a solution that integrates urban railway infrastructure features with climate change models and Satellite images, and climate data.

There is also a need to utilize new technologies, e.g., digitalization, and AI and satellite technologies to support various stakeholders to identify and implement required climate adaptation actions. Expected results and effects: During the AdaptUrbanRail project, the following outcomes have been achieved:

Better understanding of climatic impact mechanism, causal relationship and trend projection of climate change for urban railway network.

Developing a framework for integrating urban railway infrastructure features with climate change model and satellite data. Developing cost-benefit analyses for urban railway climate adaptation. Climate change risk and vulnerability analyses for urban railway network. Scale up the project and build a project consortium nationally and internationally.

Approach and implementation:

A literature review, two questionnaires, interviews and two workshops have been performed. In addition, various data, including failure data, traffic, satellite and meteorological data have been collected for a duration of 22-years.

Furthermore, extreme climate impacts on railway have been studied. PHM has been used for the integration of climate impacts on asset health. Risk analysis has been carried out to identify the most vulnerable asset. Life cycle cost analyses have been performed to estimate the monetary impact of future climate on railway infrastructure assets.