The impact of climate change and weather on transport: An overview of empirical findings

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Abstract

This paper presents a survey of the empirical literature on the effects of climate change and weather conditions on the transport sector. Despite mixed evidence on many issues, several patterns can be observed. On a global scale especially shifts in tourism and agricultural production due to increased temperatures may lead to shifts in passenger and freight transport. The predicted rise in sea levels and the associated increase in frequency and intensity of storm surges and flooding incidences may furthermore be some of the most worrying consequences of climate change, especially for coastal areas. Climate change related shifts in weather patterns might also cause infrastructure disruptions. Clear patterns are that precipitation affects road safety by increasing accident frequency but decreasing severity. Precipitation also increases congestion, especially during peak hours. Furthermore, an increased frequency of low water levels may considerably increase costs of inland waterway transport. Despite these insights, the net impact of climate change on generalised costs of the various transport modes are uncertain and ambiguous, with a possible exception for inland waterway transport.

Introduction

Climate change is almost invariably considered an issue of global interest. However, the extent to which climate change represents a problem is still a heavily debated issue; calculations on future damages associated with climate change, and therefore also judgments about mitigation and adaptation costs to be made now, differ widely. For example, the influential Stern report claims that ‘the benefits of strong, early action considerably outweigh the costs’ (Stern, 2007). Specifically, assuming no mitigation efforts, the report estimates that climate change may cause a permanent decrease in annual global GDP of between 5% and 20%, thereby claiming justification for large mitigation efforts right now. Although the report has received wide attention, substantial criticism has arisen. For instance, Tol (2006) argues that for ‘water, agriculture, health and insurance, the Stern review consistently selects the most pessimistic study in the literature’ (see also Lomborg, 2006). Another point of criticism comes from Nordhaus (2006), who focuses on the unusually low social discount rate of 0.1% used in the report. Since a near-zero discount rate gives a large weight to climate change damages in the distant future, GDP losses are large even when distant future damages are small. Using a discount rate that is more generally accepted, Nordhaus shows that the extremely low discount rate used in the Stern report is the main reason for the unusually large damage estimates.

The Stern, 2007, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007a reports analyze damages for, among others, the water, agricultural, health and insurance sectors.1 A sector that receives fairly little (explicit) attention, however, is the transport sector. This is not entirely surprising, since to date the consequences of climate change and changing weather conditions for the transport sector have not received much attention in the literature. Still, it is widely known that transport systems on the whole perform worse under adverse and extreme weather conditions. This is especially true in densely populated regions, where one single event may lead to a chain of reactions that influence large parts of the transport system. This paper therefore presents an overview of empirical findings on the impact of climate change and weather conditions on the transport sector. It is not exactly meant as a classic literature survey with a full-blown methodological assessment of studies, the topic is too broad for that. Rather we aim to give an overview of empirical insights on various relevant themes and issues. Of course, the main methodological issues are discussed and obvious shortcomings or drawbacks are addressed. The paper reflects a changing orientation in research and policy in the field of climate change. Until recently the overwhelming majority of research outputs in the field was on mitigation, the central issue being the effectiveness and efficiency of measures to reduce the environmental burden of transport (Hensher and Button, 2003, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007b).2 More recently, policy makers have more or less accepted that certain climate changes cannot be prevented, and have therefore started to explore potential adaptation strategies. Of course, adaptation and mitigation strategies are interrelated, i.e. increasing adaptation opportunities imply decreasing urgency to implement mitigation measures, and vice versa.

There are several ways to examine the influence of climate change on transport. One possible route would be to compare transport systems between regions with very different climate conditions, for example by comparing transport in Spain with transport in Norway. Differences in performance of road, rail and waterway transport systems give an indication of the potential impacts of climate change. One of the difficulties of this approach is that differences between countries are the result of a whole range of factors, where in addition to climate also other factors play a role, such as the level of economic development and physical conditions. Another approach to analyze the influence of climate would be to consider seasonal variations in transport and travel behavior. Variations in travel behavior and performance of transport systems between seasons can be partly explained by weather variations. For freight transport, variations in demand will be related to seasonal cycles in some sectors, such as the agricultural sector. For passenger transport one also has to take into account non-weather seasonal effects, such as Christmas holidays and the holiday calendar of schools, which may be partly correlated with weather. A third way to address climate issues would be to consider the instantaneous relationship between weather and travel behavior. This may be expected to lead to clearly visible adjustments, but one should be aware that these are typically short-term adjustments.

Most of the contributions address the short run demand side. Climate and weather may, however, affect the supply side as well (Transportation Research Board, 2008). For example, a supply side adjustment could be that the design of infrastructure is such that it copes with the relevant features of weather conditions, such as performance under extreme weather conditions in terms of high or low temperatures, heavy rainfall, fog, heavy wind, etc. Supply may also be affected at short notice, for example when railway companies and airports stop operations due to extreme wind conditions. Furthermore, most studies on climate and weather concern passenger transport. This makes sense, since behavioral reactions tend to be larger than in freight transport. However, given the nature of transport as a derived demand, trade flow patterns will be affected by climate change in the long run when climate change affects location patterns of production and consumption. In a similar vein seasonal variations may occur. Further, freight transport will be affected when climate or weather changes lead to changes in generalised costs of transport, directly or indirectly. For example, extreme weather may lead to accidents on roads, implying delays for both passenger and freight transport.3

Section snippets

Climate change

With respect to the consequences of climate change many uncertainties exist and the existing climate models can be criticized on a number of points. Still, these models are the current state-of-the-art, and to our knowledge there are few systematic analyses that point to climate developments that are opposed or substantially different from the ones predicted by the bulk of the models. Although some extreme contrary climate change scenarios exist, they are not likely and they too are surrounded

Extreme events: sea level rise, storm surge and flooding

Sea level rise and the associated increase in frequency and intensity of storm surges and flooding incidences are perhaps among the most worrying consequences of climate change, especially for coastal areas. With respect to North America the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007a) report states that coastal flooding due to sea level rise and storm surge is one of the most serious effects of climate change, especially along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts (Field et al., 2007). Some

Passenger transport: patterns in tourism

Climate change may have several consequences for transport demand on a global and regional scale. The potential changes in patterns of tourism are of special interest. Especially the predicted increases in temperature could have substantial effects on tourism and the associated patterns in passenger transport. Nicholls and Amelung (2008) investigate to what extent the increase in temperature affects the touristic attractiveness of countries in Europe. Their analysis shows that during the summer

Inland shipping: economic loss due to low water levels

An obvious consequence of increasing temperatures is reduced ice cover on rivers and lakes in various regions across the globe, e.g., Great Lakes in Canada, rivers in Russia. Although it is recognized that this opens up possibilities for increased transport by water, few studies actually assess this potential. For instance, Lofgren et al. (2000) show that a positive effect of climate change may be a substantial reduction in ice cover on the Great Lakes in Canada, but they do not assess the

Rail transport: infrastructure failure and accidents

Studies that investigate the effects of weather or climate change on rail transport and infrastructure are scarce. In Duinmeijer and Bouwknegt (2004) the frequency and distribution of rail infrastructure failures due to adverse weather conditions in the Netherlands in 2003 are reported. Weather appears to cause approximately 5% of all rail infrastructure failures (i.e. 5% of 8279 failures in The Netherlands in 2003), which is limited but far from negligible. Most of the weather-related failures

Road transport: traffic safety and travel times

Here we pay special attention to the effects of weather on road accidents and congestion and travel time. Obviously, these relationships are intertwined, making the relation between weather, traffic accidents and congestion an interesting but complex one. Direct empirical evidence on this complex set of relationships is scarce, however.

Behavioral responses in passenger and freight transport

In transport behavioral reactions to adverse weather may occur in various ways. We can order them according to the well known basic dimensions of trip generation, trip distribution, modal choice, route choice, temporal choice, and speed choice (De Dios Ortúzar and Willumsen, 2001). With respect to the former pair it is plausible that under adverse weather conditions certain trips are cancelled, that shopping occurs nearby rather than further away (distribution short run) and that average

Conclusions

To date, the consequences of climate change and weather conditions for the transport sector have received relatively little attention. Still, it is widely known that transport systems on the whole perform worse under adverse and extreme weather conditions. This is especially true in densely populated regions, such as many coastal areas around the globe, where one single event may lead to a chain of reactions that influence large parts of the transport system. In this paper we have provided an

Acknowledgements

This research is supported through the BSIK research program ‘Climate Changes Spatial Planning’ and the TRANSUMO (Transition Sustainable Mobility) research program ‘Adaptation to Climate Change in Transport’. We thank Jos van Ommeren and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper.

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