How will climate change affect UK transport systems?

How can we make the UK’s transport system more resistant to climate change, and what will it look like in 2050?

Those are the questions being explored by FUTURENET, a four-year, £1.5 million research project directed by a consortium of UK universities.

Academics at the University of Nottingham’s Institute for Science and Society (ISS), for example, will examine the future shape of demand for transport. For example, how will climate change affect the way we travel, and how will this affect the assumptions currently being made by planners? And if European holiday patterns shift so that large numbers of tourists from Germany or the Nordic countries come to the south of England instead of travelling to the Mediterranean, could our transport infrastructure cope?

“We need to think about why people travel,” said Robert Dingwall, director of ISS. “At the moment, research and planning mostly looks at transport from an economic perspective, assuming that it is only important for getting people to work or moving goods around — making mobility very sensitive to cost.”

He continued, “But we suspect that people also travel to maintain social relationships with family and friends, as well as for leisure purposes. This may be less sensitive to cost, while bringing important benefits in social solidarity and mutual aid that are not captured by conventional economic thinking. For example, do we want to make it more difficult for adult children to visit ageing parents if the consequence is greater dependence on local authority care?”

Unlike other projects that examine the impact of transport on climate change, FUTURENET will look at how climate change will require transport systems to adapt.

The FUTURENET consortium is led by the University of Birmingham. Other members include Loughborough University and the British Geological Survey. Network Rail and the Highways Agency are also involved. The project is jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the “Adaptation and Resilience to a Changing Climate” programme.