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125 Disruptions to the functioning of the nationâs transportation systems are occurring on a more frequent basis, with increasingly severe consequences, as climate change spawns more extreme weather events, leads to sea level rise, and alters temperature and precipitation norms. Preventing the occur- rence and reducing the severity of these disruptions will become increas- ingly challenging, and the costs to society and the economy will escalate if this challenge goes unmet. There is a compelling case for investing in projects that will make transportation systems more resilient to disruptions by maintaining or quickly regaining their functionality during and after a natural disaster and over time as the climate changes. However, setting priorities and making commitments to investments in resilience can present vexing choices for planners and decision makers. The ability to evaluate the benefits and costs of these investments can support sound choices when resources are limited. The committeeâs review of practice and research did not identify a single metric, or even a small set of metrics, that can be readily developed and generally applied to improve the resilience of transportation systems. The analysis of resilience is heavily dependent on metrics for functionality and damage, which differ by mode and infrastructure type. In addition, transportation agenciesâ vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change effects can vary widely. Agencies also need to be able to be responsive to unique constituent concerns. Despite these challenges, significant progress has been made over the past decade in integrating resilience criteria into transportation decision making, including the development, piloting, and use of innovative tools 6 Conclusions and Recommendations
126 INVESTING IN TRANSPORTATION RESILIENCE for resilience measurement, evaluation, and investment prioritization. The federal modal agencies and the state and local owners of infrastructure have commissioned numerous reports, funded and participated in pilot programs, developed guidance documents, and began implementing the recommended practices. Still, there is much to be done to improve the inte- gration of resilience into the decision making of all transportation agencies, small to large, and across the modes. The committee concluded that the widespread adoption of a system- atic decision support framework is the most promising way for making resilience a key driver of agency decision making. As described in detail in Chapter 5, this decision support framework includes general principles and a multi-step analysis process. The principles are designed to ensure that the framework is practical to use and generally applicable across modes, loca- tions, time spans, and hazards. Resilience decision making should account for uncertainties and be as objective as feasible, preferring quantitative analysis and insisting that qualitative analysis be based on data and expert judgment. Resilience decision making should also be able to analyze strate- gies that speed response and recovery, as well as those that prevent damage and disruption. In addition, transportation agencies should be encouraged to take a multi-hazard approach to resilience analysis. Too often, agencies still fo- cus on a repeat of the most recent disaster or focus on only a small set of relevant hazards. Especially because of climate change, agencies should be encouraged to examine the set of plausible hazards. Robust multi-hazard approaches also analyze multiple hazards occurring in quick succession, overlapping hazards, and cascading hazards, when one hazard causes or worsens a subsequent hazard. The gradual impacts of climate change need to be considered as part of multi-hazard assessments, not only because they can be costly on their own but also because they can worsen the impacts of other natural hazards. The recommended multi-step decision support framework includes detailed inventories of assets that exist and are planned; assessments of the characteristics and likelihood of natural hazards occurring in the future; and predictions of the vulnerability of the inventoried assets to disruption, damage, and destruction from the hazards. These assessments should be accompanied by determinations of the criticality, or importance, of each assetâs functionality and estimates of the consequences of damages to the asset and its lost or degraded functionality. Options for improving resilience should be analyzed in terms of their benefits (i.e., loss avoidance and costs, broadly defined). Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is the analytic tool often used to support decision making about investment alternatives. BCA offers methods to analyze investments in resilience that require spending funds in the present
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 127 to gain benefits that may or may not be realized in the future. It can also accommodate the consideration of life-cycle costs. However, while evalu- ating the costs of investments designed to improve resilience is typically a relatively straightforward exercise, more work still needs to be done to comprehensively assess the benefits of such investments. Although BCA typically requires translating benefits and costs into monetary values, resil- ience investments can also be evaluated using quantitative, non-monetary measures and qualitative descriptions to account for the full set of possible benefits and costs, including equity and distributional consequences. To carry out resilience assessments, transportation agencies need high- quality data and analytic tools. Unfortunately, much of the data required for advanced analytic tools are not readily available today. Agencies need infor- mation on the characteristics of natural hazards and their likelihood in the location of existing and planned assets. They need access to science-based and updated projections about future impacts of climate change on natural hazards and on temperature and precipitation norms in these locations. They need strong asset management programs that include evaluations of asset vulnerabilities and estimation of functional values (i.e., criticality). They need mode-specific data and modeling tools to estimate the direct and indirect consequences of asset damage and loss of functionality. And they need data and modeling tools that can reveal the economic and social importance of the asset to users, directly affected communities, and the broader region. Where there are gaps in essential data and in the needed analytic tools, transportation agencies may need to tap expert judgment. Pilot programs, often led by federal agencies, have played a crucial role in advancing practices that integrate resilience into decision making and have shown the way to making resilience-based decision making more routine. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has been especially active in developing and piloting methods and tools that have increased the familiarity with resilience assessments among state and local transportation agencies. However, these programs remain limited in their scale and scope. Without the additional support of expanded pilot programs, transportation agencies are likely to continue to struggle with the translation of resilience from a concept to a decision criterion. RECOMMENDATIONS To motivate and facilitate the use of a systematic decision-making frame- work for resilience, more direction, prompting, and guidance are needed. Leadership from Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) will be critical to advancing the development and implementation of a systematic framework, including its relevant analytical tools, metrics, and supporting data. The five recommendations that follow are directed
128 INVESTING IN TRANSPORTATION RESILIENCE to Congress and U.S. DOT, but their aim is to strengthen the resilience practices and capabilities of thousands of state, regional, and local trans- portation agencies. RECOMMENDATION 1: To ensure the routine and deliberate consideration of resilience to support the selection of major transportation investments, Congress should consider a requirement for which all projects that involve long-lived assets and that are candidates for federal funding undergo well-defined resilience assess- ments that account for changing risks of natural hazards and environ mental conditions stemming from climate change. These assessments could be integrated into environmental impact assessments or other project evalu- ation efforts, such as during benefit-cost analysis. The level of analytical effort expected in these resilience assessments should be reasonably related to the cost of the project being considered. Each projectâs selection should include the results of analyses in which resilience benefits are calculated through a multi-step analytic framework that includes assessments of all plausible natural hazards and their likeli- hood, including simultaneous and cascading hazards; the vulnerabilities of the asset to damage and disruption from the hazards; and the adverse con- sequences from the damage and disruption to functionality as they impact the owners and users of the assets and the broader community. RECOMMENDATION 2: The Office of the Secretary of Transportation should promote the use of benefit-cost analysis for project justifications that take into account the resilience benefits estimated using the multi-step analytic framework recom- mended above. The benefits from adding resilience, in the form of reduced future losses, in relation to the life-cycle costs of doing so should be pro- moted as the basis for selecting investments in resilience. Although the practice of BCA is often associated with an overempha- sis on the benefits and costs that can be more confidently monetized, the nature of resilience impacts, coupled with the demands of practical decision making, call for analyses that are attentive to all important effects, whether represented in monetary, quantitative, or qualitative terms. The Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST) should offer guidance on how im- portant benefits and costs that cannot be reduced to monetary units can be appropriately incorporated in BCA. Such benefits and costs include those affecting equity and the distribution of impacts.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 129 RECOMMENDATION 3: The Office of the Secretary of Transportation should provide guidance to the U.S. Department of Transportation modal administrations on the de- velopment of analytic methods and tools for estimating resilience benefits that are applicable to transportation agencies in their respective modes. The guidance should build on lessons learned from initiatives by FHWA and other federal and state agencies to pilot analytic approaches like the multi-step framework recommended above for use in assessing resilience on major transportation projects receiving federal funds. The guidance should point to the kinds of data and analytic tools required to perform each step in the assessments, and it should explain how the results can be used in BCA for decision making that incorporates resilience. The development of guidance should encompass, to the extent pos- sible, strategies designed to improve resilience through speeding response and recovery, as well as strategies that prevent damage and disruption to infrastructure assets. RECOMMENDATION 4: Congress should direct, and appropriately resource, the Office of the Sec- retary of Transportation to conduct a study to (1) define the types of data that transportation agencies need for resilience analysis in accordance with the framework recommended above; (2) identify potential sources of these requisite data; and (3) advise on possible means for making the data more suitable to this purpose, including filling key data gaps and ensuring timely data updates. This study will require consultation with other federal agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Geo- logical Survey, where much of the data needed for resilience analysis are maintained. Such consultation should cover how transportation agencies are to acquire the required information, including its format and level of detail, keep the information sufficiently up to date, and obtain additional information that is not readily available. This study should include consid- eration of the information requirements for addressing how climate change may worsen the impact of existing natural hazards. The study should note where new statutory authorities and appropriations may be required to enable these purposes.
130 INVESTING IN TRANSPORTATION RESILIENCE RECOMMENDATION 5: The Office of the Secretary of Transportation should coordinate with the modal agencies on the design and conduct of structured pilots to assess and demonstrate the applicability of each agencyâs guidance and suggested tools for estimating resilience benefits according to the recommended multi-step analytic framework. FHWAâs series of pilot programs for highway resilience analysis should be used as a model for these structured mode-specific pilots, which have led to increased state and local transportation agency familiarity with resilience analysis and to continual improvements in FHWAâs guidance on analytic methods and appropriate tools. The pilots should incorporate all of the elements of the analytic frame- work: identifying the assets, evaluating asset criticality, characterizing potential natural hazards and climate change effects, evaluating vulner- ability of critical assets, characterizing consequences of hazard/climate on functionality, estimating risk, identifying options to reduce risk, conducting BCA, and providing advice for investment decisions. The pilot programs should also apply the framework to hazard event response and recovery, including organizational assets and strategies.
