Transportation and Climate Change Newsletter

Transportation and Climate Change Newsletter

Prepared by the Office of Planning, Environment and Realty Federal Highway Administration www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/climate_change/

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FHWA Sustainability and Climate Change Sessions at TRB FHWA will present findings from new research and practice on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to climate change impacts, and improving transportation sustainability at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, January 11-15, in Washington, DC.  See session list. 

Workshop on FHWA Climate Resilience Pilots at TRB Annual Meeting: Sunday, January 11, 9:00-12:00, Convention Center, 209C This workshop presents the results from several of the FHWA-sponsored climate resilience pilot projects.

Webcast to Roll-out Climate Change Risk Management Tools: January 22, 2:00-3:30 EST Climate/Weather Risk Management Tools for Transportation Professionals - Learning from the Gulf Coast will be a live 1.5 hour webcast to introduce findings from the study and vulnerability assessment tools that will be freely available on FHWA's website. The webcast will be followed by a series of webinars with more detailed information about the tools and resources from the study. Register for the event here.

FHWA Issues Climate Change and Extreme Weather Resilience Order FHWA Order 5520, Transportation System Preparedness and Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events, was signed on December 15, 2014 and states that it is FHWA policy to integrate consideration of climate and extreme weather risks into its planning, operations, policies and programs. Over the past decade FHWA has been a recognized leader in developing methods and tools to assist transportation agencies in assessing the vulnerabilities and risks of their transportation systems to the impacts of climate change and extreme weather. This new Order formalizes FHWA's commitment to this issue, guides the agencies' implementation of relevant MAP-21 provisions and recent Executive Orders, and identifies how the agency intends to continue to lead the transportation industry in making the nation's highways more resilient.

CEQ Issues NEPA Climate Guidance for Public Comment The revised NEPA climate change guidance, updated from a draft version released in 2010, will be published in the Federal Register for a 60-day public comment period. The guidance addresses when and how climate change might be addressed in agency environmental reviews. It recommends a "reference point" of 25,000 tons per year of CO2 equivalent emissions as an indication of the proposed actions that would include a greenhouse gas analysis. It provides agency discretion to select the appropriate level of analysis, whether at the programmatic or landscape scale or at the project specific level. It also recommends agencies use the information developed during the NEPA review to consider alternatives that are more resilient to the effects of a changing climate. And noting that climate change can affect the vulnerability of a resource, ecosystem, human community, or structure, the guidance considers the affected environment of an action to include both the current and the expected future environment, for the life of the proposed project, based on available climate information. If finalized in its current form, the guidance would be applicable to all new agency actions and to on-going actions where practicable. [Update: the revised draft guidance was published in the December 24, 2014 Federal Register.  Comments are due February 23, 2015.]

USDOT Releases Agency Adaptation Plan The 2014 DOT Adaptation Plan outlines the steps USDOT is taking to help improve the resilience of the Nation's transportation system. The plan was developed in accordance with the Council of Environmental Quality's Federal Agency Climate Change Adaptation Planning Implementing Instructions.

FHWA Engineering Circular Outlines Methods for Improving Coastal Highway Resilience Hydraulic Engineering Circular 25, Vol. 2: Highways in the Coastal Environment: Assessing Extreme Events (October, 2014) provides technical guidance and methods for assessing the vulnerability of coastal transportation facilities to extreme events and climate change, focusing on sea level rise, storm surge, and waves. Approaches are based upon using risk-based, data driven concepts manifested by three different levels of effort ranging from use of available data to original numerical modeling. The manual also contains a method for computing relative sea level rise based on local tidal gages and likely impacts of climate change. The FHWA anticipates that there will be multiple uses for this guidance including risk and vulnerability assessments, coastal floodplain management, planning activities, and design procedure development. HEC-25 v2 aligns with current and anticipated FHWA policy and programmatic guidance in areas of extreme events, extreme weather events, climate change, adaptation, and resilience.

USDOT Releases Climate Change Resilience Engineering Case Studies The latest release from USDOT's multiyear study of potential climate impacts in Mobile, Alabama, Engineering Assessments of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Measures, discusses a series of engineering assessments on specific transportation facilities in Mobile that evaluated whether those facilities might be vulnerable to projected changes in climate, and what specific adaptation measures could be effective in mitigating those vulnerabilities. It includes a description of the climate impact assessment process used, as well as findings that may apply more generally to engineering design practices, operations and maintenance practices, and other lessons learned. A roll-out webcast of the larger study, Impacts of Climate Change and Variability on Transportation Systems and Infrastructure: The Gulf Coast Study, Phase 2, will be held in January (see announcement below.

FHWA Funds Greenhouse Gas Analysis Approaches Four awards were made as a result of a July 2014 FHWA solicitation to assist State DOTs and MPOs in performing a greenhouse gas/energy analysis at the planning level. The following organizations were awarded funding:

• Massachusetts DOT - to analyze and quantify greenhouse gas emissions benefits from current activities, as well as estimate the impact of a set of potential future policies and strategies in an effort to assist the State in meeting their greenhouse gas targets and goals. The project will utilize FHWA's Energy and Emissions Reduction Policy Analysis Tool (EERPAT).

• Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission - to update an electric vehicle ownership analysis, and develop a spreadsheet tool to determine the changes in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with different electric vehicle and compressed natural gas vehicle deployment scenarios.

• East-West Gateway Council of Governments - to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from on-road vehicles at the regional and sub-regional scales, and to analyze future emissions for multiple policy and land use scenarios. The project will also include the feasibility of corridor-level greenhouse gas analysis.

• Southern California Association of Governments - to advance methods of analyzing greenhouse gas emissions generated from multimodal transit trips, including first-last mile access and egress from stations. The findings will be used to prioritize the most effective transportation and land-use planning strategies for optimizing greenhouse gas reductions achieved from transit investments.

USDOT Workshop Focuses on Connected Vehicles The USDOT ITS Joint Program Office (JPO) held a connected vehicle environmental application workshop on October 22 in Washington D.C. The workshop provided an overview of USDOT's Connected Vehicle (CV) Pilots initiative, and solicited stakeholder feedback on potential CV applications that could lead to emissions and fuel use reductions and serve as candidates for near-term deployment. Also featured were presentations on real-world applications of CV technology, and estimates of potential emissions and fuel use reductions that were modeled through the JPO's Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS) program. Additional information is available on the workshop and the AERIS program.

IPCC Releases Synthesis of Fifth Climate Assessment The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final installment in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which consists of three Working Group reports and the newly released Synthesis Report. AR5 provides an overview of the state of knowledge concerning the science of climate change, emphasizing new results since the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. The synthesis combines the main findings of reports on the Physical Science Basis; Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and Mitigation of Climate Change; plus two additional IPCC reports: Special Report on Renewable Energy and Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. The report includes discussion on the importance of understanding and mitigating risks and dealing with uncertainty