Ongoing and Current Research
PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®
- Building Climate Resilient Transportation (also in PDF, 2.8MB) - Four page graphic summary of current FHWA work on climate change adaptation. Describes how FHWA, states, and regions are responding to climate change and what transportation agencies can do.
- Climate Resilience Pilots - This project funds pilots for DOTs, MPOs, and FLMAs to implement a framework to use in conducting vulnerability and risk assessments of infrastructure to the projected impacts of climate change and extreme weather events and to develop adaptation options.
- Green Infrastructure Techniques for Improving Coastal Highway Resilience - This project is investigating nature-based techniques (e.g. Living Shorelines) that could be implemented as part of highway and bridge planning, design, maintenance and construction to preserve and/or improve natural infrastructure function, thereby increasing the resilience of highways to the effects of storm surges and sea level rise. Project elements include green infrastructure assessment pilots, a white paper, regional peer exchanges, and an implementation guide. Proposals for pilot projects are due June 1, 2016.
- Gulf Coast Study - FHWA is now publicizing the nationally applicable tools and lessons learned that emerged from this groundbreaking study. Products include tools to help transportation agencies process and interpret climate data, assess vulnerabilities, and analyze adaptation options. The research comprises a multi-modal study of climate change impacts and adaptation in the Central Gulf Coast region. Phase 1 (completed in 2008) examined the impacts of climate change on transportation infrastructure at a regional scale, while Phase 2 (completed in 2015) focused on a smaller region, enhancing regional decision makers' ability to understand potential impacts on specific critical components of infrastructure and to evaluate adaptation options.
- Hurricane Sandy Follow-up and Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Analysis - The objective of this project is to assess the impacts of October 2012's Hurricane Sandy, (and to a lesser extent, Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Lee, and the Halloween Nor'easter in 2011) on the transportation assets within the greater NY- NJ - CT metropolitan region, assess the vulnerability of those assets to the impacts of extreme weather events and the possible future impacts of climate change, and identify adaptation strategies to increase the resilience of the transportation system.
- Transportation Engineering Approaches to Climate Resiliency (TEACR) The objective of this project is to develop recommended engineering practices for identifying and evaluating project-level vulnerabilities from future extreme weather events and climate change, and designing solutions to respond and adapt to those vulnerabilities. Engineering analyses of a diverse set of transportation assets around the country will be performed in order to identify best practices for improving the resiliency of the transportation system to extreme weather and climate change. The result will be a cross-cutting set of recommendations for engineering practice to cover a wide range of facility types and locations.
- Summary of FHWA Climate Adaptation Initiatives - A chronological summary of FHWA climate adaptation initiatives and how the work began and evolved.