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Climate resilience: how rail will weather the storm
Industry’s Climate Change Adaptation Working Group has agreed a consistent set of climate change projections for rail.
Sam JonesEnvironment Specialist, Sustainable Development at RSSB
At RSSB, we’re keen advocates for common ways of working, such as in our standards. These are designed in consultation with industry to enable consistent, harmonised methods of working across the network, and the result is enhanced safety and efficiency.
Clearly, there’s value in this approach. So, what if we apply it to an area that becomes even more critical with each passing year—an area that must be at the top of every rail organisation’s agenda? Sustainability.
Until now, rail had been using a variety of climate change projections to understand how future climate conditions might change over time. Both the UK Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produce these projections, but the quantity and complexity of the projections make it difficult for operators to know which ones to use. So, there’s been no consistency in approach.
This uncertainty could lead to varying results in critical areas, such as risk assessments and vulnerability management. To address this, members of the Climate Change Adaptation Working Group (CCAWG) have agreed on a standardised set of climate change projections, and we’ve now published these as a best practice guide on our website.
Working from these agreed climate change projections has a number of benefits for the rail industry. For example, taking this approach can:
support risk and vulnerability assessments
underpin strategic planning
inform project design, asset management, and operations
ensure cohesive focus across passenger operators, freight operators, and infrastructure bodies.
The rate and outcomes of climate change are likely to shift as time goes on. So, CCAWG will review these projections every 5–10 years, and our good practice guide will be updated accordingly.
Adopting this standardised approach to climate change projections will ensure that rail can effectively plan for future conditions, enhance resilience, and maintain its focus on sustainability across all parts of the industry.
The consistency it brings will support long-term strategic planning and operational efficiency, ultimately leading to a more sustainable and robust rail network. And by regularly reviewing and updating these projections, we can stay ahead of emerging challenges and continue to thrive in a changing climate.
How do climate projections work?
Climate projections estimate how future conditions—including temperature, rainfall, and sea levels—might change over time. They’re based on various scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions, and they use climate models to predict possible outcomes under different assumptions about human activities. This gives us useful insights about how climate change could impact our environment.
There are two different types of climate change scenarios: Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and H++ scenarios.
RCPs use four scenarios for different emissions levels, and each is tested at three different probability levels. While this system gives a larger range of potential scenarios to plan for, CCAWG considers it more manageable to use only one or two scenarios for practical risk assessment, asset management, and engineering purposes. RCP measures have been agreed for three of CCAWG’s tasks.
H++ scenarios go beyond the upper RCP limits, and they’re only tied to a specific extreme worst-case impact. H++ has been agreed for one of CCAWG’s tasks, helping to safeguard against the most severe (but low probability) outcomes.
Having this information to hand helps policymakers prepare for the future. They can use this data in practical ways to plan for a variety of different environmental conditions and better embed resilience into rail.
Want to learn more?
To explore these agreed projections in full, have a look at our good practice guide.
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