Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) released a report completed for the Region X Northwest Transportation Consortium (NW and Alaska state DOTs), titled “Climate Change Impact Assessment for Surface Transportation in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska”.
The report looks at how the changing climate will affect our transportation network. It predicts It analyzes the likely impact of climate change on: regional temperatures, including extreme hot days and heat waves, arctic temperatures, permafrost and freeze/thaw events, sea levels and the intensity of precipitation events. All of these changes will have impacts on how we develop and manage our transportation system. This report states, “Changing weather patterns and their associated physical, financial and social impacts are affecting or will affect the way transportation professionals finance, plan, design, construct, operate and maintain multimodal transportation infrastructure.”
The report does not discuss ways to reduce climate pollution that leads to climate change, because the focus is on how we must adapt to the climate change that is already occuring.
