Assessing resilience

An engineering team from Birmingham University has received a £1.5m government grant to examine how to make the UK's transport systems resilient to climate change.

The EPSRC-funded, four-year study will predict the nature of the UK's transport systems by the year 2050, making recommendations to ensure that it will be able to cope with the disruptive effects of extreme weather events.

The effort includes project partners Hydraulics Research, British Geological Survey, Transport Research Laboratory and the universities of Nottingham and Loughborough.

Civil engineers at Birmingham will investigate how transport and infrastructure will change over the coming decades and assess its resilience. The group will make suggestions on technological changes that could be built into the design of future systems to make them more robust. Researchers at Birmingham University’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences will devise future weather models to identify the kind of meteorological impacts that will affect the transport infrastructure.