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Moderator: Patrick Breuer 

Climate Risk Assessments for Transportation Assets: Lessons Learned and Recommended Practices

Presenter: Donavan Jacobsen

Transport Canada’s five-year Transportation Assets Risk Assessment (TARA) initiative funds the assessment of climate risk for federal transportation assets. Since launch of the initiative in 2017, $6M in project funding has been approved for climate risk assessment and instrumentation projects for airports, highways, bridges and ferry terminals, as well as research projects that seek to identify and address gaps and barriers to assessing climate risk.

Through TARA initiative implementation, Transport Canada has delivered and advised on numerous climate risk assessment contracts, climate data and impact analyses, and climate risk assessment workshops, resulting in an early list of lessons learned relating to climate risk assessments for transportation assets. These lessons focus on how to select the appropriate tool for the assessment, what decisions need to be made at the outset of a project, and how to structure your work to get a product that can be used for decision-making.

Integrating Climate Risk Knowledge into Practice at the Maryland Department of Transportation

Presenter: Susan Asam and Cassandra Bhat

This presentation will focus on a suite of practical strategies that the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration (MDOT SHA) is taking to ensure that individuals across the organization are taking account of potential climate change risks in their decision-making. For example, MDOT SHA is developing and distributing a centralized online viewer to share asset risk data; conducting trainings with internal and external partners on how to access, interpret and use the data; integrating future flood frequencies into pavement performance modelling; screening for climate risks in project planning and design processes; and more. The presentation will focus on lessons learned and best practices emerging from this experience, such as how to structure and present risk assessment results to facilitate uptake, engaging a wide variety of staff, and achieving organizational change.