Improving climate risk preparedness - Railroads in Norway

Climate change affects all sectors of society due to changes in temperature and precipitation patterns and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Extreme weather events are already more frequent and intense, generating additional costs for businesses nationally and globally. Climate risk disclosure and management can be challenging due to the complexity of climate impacts and unpredictability of extreme events’ occurrence and location. To address the need for a systematic approach to manage physical climate change, this paper presents a ‘preparedness framework’ for a comprehensive physical climate risk assessment, which is inspired by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures’ (TCFD) framework and based on interviews with representatives from the financial sector in Norway and Sweden on their management of climate risks. We analyze railroads in Norway as a case study due to the sector’s sensitivity to flooding events and heat stress. After assessing Bane NOR’s management of risk associated with flooding and heat stress, we discuss potential improvements regarding knowledge, strategy, management, and tools and metrics at a general level, emphasizing the benefits of improving capacity to handle climate change and the importance of contingency plans. The preparedness framework has helped identify strategies and actions that can reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts. We suggest that this checklist is sufficiently general to be applicable for other sectors and countries.

Practical Implications

Transportation is one of the sectors that may be significantly affected by climate change, and this includes railroads and train travel. Heavy rain events, dry spells, extreme temperatures, and freeze–thaw events can cause problems for railroad operations. We have therefore chosen railroads in Norway, with Bane NOR as the state-owned organization responsible for the administration of the network, as an insightful case for examining the climate risk and vulnerability to climate change. We introduce a ‘preparedness framework’ as a tool for identifying and handling climate risk. The preparedness framework aims to combine science-based information with the user context and their needs according to their activity and vulnerability to climate change impacts. The framework can highlight Bane NOR’s general potential to reduce vulnerability and improve resilience to withstand negative impacts caused by climate change. Building resilience is paramount to business continuity, and involves climate stress-testing, precautionary action, better information carrying less uncertainty, capacity building, and contingency plans in the case of climate-related disturbances affecting train operations. This requires efficient monitoring, closer attention to weather forecasts, good maintenance, as well as implementing measures such as lowering the speed limit for trains in high-risk situations. Contingency plans include provision of alternative transportation when tracks are blocked. We envisage that the preparedness framework’ checklist can be applied to other sectors than railroads and other countries than Norway.