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Adaptation Policy Framework for Climate Change Impacts on Transportation Sector in Developing Countries

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Abstract

The global response to climate change threat has been through mitigation by reducing the GHG emissions; however, some of the climate change effects are inevitable and unavoidable. Adaptation is seen as a necessary means of addressing these inevitable climate change effects, some of which are projected to bring more frequent and severe precipitation resulting in floods. This threat of floods reinforced by rapid urbanization, resulting in urban flooding has become a looming threat to road transportation which disproportionally affects developing countries. There is an urgent need to adapt transport infrastructure to the anticipated climate change effects to minimize human as well as economic losses. In this paper, a consolidated review of literature on road transport-related climate change adaptation measures adopted across different countries around the world has been done, followed by the identification of barriers and adaptation challenges in developing countries such as India. Further, a novel methodological approach has been proposed for shaping adaptation policies in developing countries. It is aimed to enhance the resilience of transportation system specifically against urban flooding induced by climate change, reduce its impacts and strengthen the adaptive capacity of the system.

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Notes

  1. Climate-ADAPT web platform provides access to all reports, studies, etc, both ongoing and completed, available at: http://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu.

  2. Adaptation policies are region as well as time specific which vary from place to place for current and future circumstances.

  3. The authors argue that barriers are different from limits which are self-existent in the system and can’t be removed while barriers are obstructions that can be eliminated by various means.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the opportunity to present the research work that forms the basis of this article at the 12th Transportation Planning and Implementation Methodologies for Developing Countries (TPMDC) Conference held at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai (India) from 19 to 21 December, 2016. This research work is supported through Indo-Norway research project Norges Research Council no. ITEN-001 titled “CLIMATRANS: Coping with Climate: Assessing Transport Sector Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Indian Cities” funded by the Research Council of Norway. The authors also acknowledge the contribution of Ms. GirijaUmashankar and Ms. Mehvish Shah, two ex-senior research fellows at IISc Bangalore whose work served as a base reference for this study.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

    Harsha Vajjarapu & Ashish Verma

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Saqib Gulzar

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  1. Harsha Vajjarapu
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Vajjarapu, H., Verma, A. & Gulzar, S. Adaptation Policy Framework for Climate Change Impacts on Transportation Sector in Developing Countries. Transp. in Dev. Econ. 5, 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40890-019-0071-y

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