Abstract
30 to 50 % of road maintenance costs in Europe are weather-related, with precipitation triggered events, like flooding and mass movement, contributing most. As most transport occurs on roads, damage implications of road transport infrastructure are explicitly relevant. In this chapter, we focus therefore on damages to road transport infrastructure and assess the costs of climate change induced repair and investment for the Austrian road network until mid-century. In addition to changed precipitation patterns, we also take road network expansion into account. We find that precipitation triggered damage costs to the Austrian road network are 18 million euros per year in the period 1981–2010. These damages increase to 27 million euros per year in the period 2016–2045 and 38 million euros in the period 2036–2065. For Austria in total, the lion’s share of this cost increase is caused by an increase in exposed values (road network expansion), not climate change. While some regions are characterised by increases in precipitation, precipitation is decreasing in others, and there is also a seasonal shift. As a consequence, the overall effect of changes in precipitation is modest for Austria in total. The induced additional investment needed for road maintenance due primarily to road network extension and only secondarily to climate change is beneficial for the construction sector, but affects other sectors negatively due to higher prices. As a consequence, the decline in welfare and GDP is about three times larger than the additional investment cost for both periods (2016–2045 and 2036–2065).
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Notes
- 1.
The contribution of transport to climate change is both from transport operation (greenhouse gas emissions) and from transport infrastructure (paving of natural surface), and the latter may enhance susceptibility to e.g. flooding and aggravate climate change impacts.
- 2.
- 3.
Nevertheless, the resulting estimates should be understood as lower bound estimates for the climate change induced costs which may arise to transport and mobility in Austria.
- 4.
NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) is an Eurostat classification for different levels of a country. Austria (NUTS-0 level) is divided in nine provinces (NUTS-2 level) and 35 groups of districts (NUTS-3 level).
- 5.
We tested also for the influence of different climatic factors on the occurrence of damage events and costs in the dataset for Styria and Salzburg and found that daily precipitation has a significant and positive influence on damages but temperature does not.
- 6.
As damage events with small damage cost are found frequently in the data also for days with very little precipitation, we compared distribution functions for different threshold levels (€ 20,000, € 30,000, and € 40,000). While all three regressions had a good fit, € 30,000 was chosen as the threshold for further analysis because a threshold of € 20,000 was well below mean damages and a threshold of € 40,000 reduced the number of included events by 50% relative to the a threshold of € 30,000.
- 7.
As suggested by one of the reviewers, an alternative assumption on the development of costs per event could be that improved technology might reduce vulnerability of roads and hence real costs could also decrease over time. Due to lack of information on such cost developments, we do not explore this alternative option in our assessment.
- 8.
Gross domestic product (GDP) of a country is the value of all produced goods and services within a year. GDP can be determined by the sum of all sectoral net value added. Note that GDP only measures flows and therefore gives no information about the development of (natural) stocks,
- 9.
Welfare is measured as the quantity of private and government final demand (consumption) priced with baseline prices. The standard welfare measure is corrected by forced consumption which is not welfare enhancing (e.g. additional water consumption which is necessary to provide the same service level as without climate change).
- 10.
But on the other hand, additional bypass/detour routes might lead to less loss-of-time and thus lower indirect /costs of service interruptions, if this effect is not offset by higher traffic volumes. While the public budget is mostly affected by infrastructure damages (considered in this chapter), damages due to service interruptions will materialise mainly in the private sector (not considered in this chapter).
- 11.
Some alpine access roads might need either significant adaptation investment or deconstruction/resettlements should be considered if investments do not pay off. In fact, the regional distribution of costs and benefits is diverse: road sections on or along slippery terrain (or in vicinity of melting permafrost rocky terrain, accelerating rock decomposition/rock fall, which has not been investigated here) would produce significant damages further on and—at least seasonally—face additional damage costs and interruptions of services.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter presents research undertaken as part of the adapt2to4 project. This project was funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund and carried out under the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP).
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Bednar-Friedl, B. et al. (2015). Transport. In: Steininger, K., König, M., Bednar-Friedl, B., Kranzl, L., Loibl, W., Prettenthaler, F. (eds) Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts. Springer Climate. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12457-5_15
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