Disaster and Climate-Resilient Transport Guidance Note

Overview & Synopsis

As climate change accelerates, transport networks face both direct and indirect disruptions, impacting trade, mobility, and economic stability. Extreme weather events damage critical infrastructure, isolating communities and disrupting supply chains, having a significant impact on economic growth. Recognizing these challenges, the World Bank Group has committed to raising annual climate financing to US 40 billion dollars by 2025, with 45 percent of total financing directed toward climate action. To effectively address climate risks on transportation system functionality, considering a more comprehensive approach is essential. Rather than focusing solely on hard infrastructure, resilience must be built through transport systems and the community. This is critical to effectively withstand climate hazards while supporting business continuity and communities’ adaptability to disruptions. The World Bank therefore developed the life-cycle approach, i.e. a five-pillar approach, to enable climate resilience to be embedded into every phase of the transport infrastructure life cycle: system planning and financing to assess risks and guide investments, engineering, and design to develop cost-effective adaptation solutions, operations and maintenance to facilitate proactive monitoring and climate-smart upkeep, contingency planning to strengthen emergency response, and institutional capacity and coordination to enhance cross-sector collaboration.