Professor Saini Yang - Transportation Infrastructure Risk Assessment on the context of Climate Change

IAS Visiting Fellow Professor Saini Yang delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Transportation Infrastructure Risk Assessment on the context of Climate Change" Climate change poses a critical threat to the resilience and functionality of transportation infrastructure. Traditional risk assessments, often focused on physical losses and single assets, are inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected, and non-stationary nature of climate impacts on transportation system. This necessitates a shift towards a holistic risk assessment framework. Such a framework moves beyond evaluating individual components like bridges or roads in isolation, instead considering the entire transportation system as a dynamic network. It employs high-resolution climate projections to understand future hazard exposure, including sea-level rise, extreme precipitation, and heatwaves, and conducts a multi-faceted vulnerability analysis that assesses not only physical susceptibility but also functional dependencies, operational capacity, and socioeconomic consequences of service disruption. Finally, it quantifies systemic risk by modeling cascading failures across the network, where damage to one node can propagate and cripple regional mobility and supply chains. This integrated framework enables policymakers and engineers to identify critical vulnerabilities, prioritize cost-effective adaptation investments, and enhance the long-term resilience of transportation infrastructure, ensuring its continued role in economic stability and societal well-being. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias