Coastal Nature-Based Solutions: Lessons Learned, August 2024. This fact-sheet summarizes emerging practices and lessons learned for planning, designing, and implementing Coastal Nature-Based Solutions.
Nature-Based Solutions for Coastal Highway Resilience: An Implementation Guide(September, 2019) The Implementation Guide is designed to help transportation practitioners understand how and where nature-based solutions can be used to improve the resilience of coastal roads and bridges. Upfront, it summarizes the potential flood-reduction benefits and co-benefits of these strategies. From there, the guide follows the steps in the project delivery process, providing guidance on how to consider nature-based solutions in the planning process, how to conduct a site assessment to determine whether nature-based solutions are appropriate, key engineering and ecological design considerations, permitting approaches, construction considerations, and monitoring and maintenance strategies. (PDF, 5.5MB)
White Paper: Nature-based Solutions for Coastal Highway Resilience(March 2018) - Briefly describes the current state of practice regarding the use of natural and nature-based features to protect coastal roads from flooding. Provides an overview of available tools for design, implementation challenges, and knowledge gaps. (PDF, 754 KB)
Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Framework, Third Edition(December 2017) - This document is a guide for transportation agencies interested in assessing their vulnerability to extreme weather events and changing conditions. It gives an overview of key steps in conducting vulnerability assessments and uses in-practice examples to demonstrate a variety of ways to gather and process information. (PDF, 17.7MB)
In July 2017, FHWA published a study to assess the impacts of October 2012's Hurricane Sandy, (and to a lesser extent, Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Lee, and the Halloween Nor'easter in 2011) on the transportation assets within the greater NY-NJ-CT metropolitan region, assess the vulnerability of those assets to the impacts of extreme weather events and the possible future impacts of a changing conditions, and identify adaptation strategies to increase the resilience of the transportation system.
Resilience Pilot Reports and Information - In multiple groups of pilot projects, FHWA partnered with states and metropolitan areas to conduct vulnerability assessments of transportation infrastructure and to analyze options for adapting and improving resiliency.
Gulf Coast Study Reports(January 2015) - This groundbreaking U.S. DOT study produced tools and lessons learned that transportation agencies across the country are using to assess vulnerabilities and build resilience. Reports include 1) synthesis of lessons learned and methods applied; 2) criticality assessment; 3) temperature and precipitation projections and sensitivity assessment; 4) vulnerability assessment; 5) engineering assessment of adaptation options. Summaries and multi-media materials also available.
Engineering
Pavement Resilience: State of the Practice(March 2023) - This document examines pavement resilience, a subset of transportation resilience, and describes the state of knowledge, practice, and future needs based on (1) key national and international resilience documents, (2) a FHWA approach to resilience, (3) the results of an unpublished literature review, and (4) the findings from two FHWAsponsored Peer Exchanges on pavement resilience held in late 2020.
The Office of Infrastructure published a manual (2023) that supports transportation agencies in adopting a proactive Geohazards and Resilience approach.
Emerging Issues Associated with Sea Level Rise: Findings from FHWA Peer Exchanges(August 2022) – This report summarizes the results of peer exchanges FHWA convened in four States focused on transportation infrastructure's vulnerability to sea level rise, both now and in the future. Issues addressed included sunny day flooding (nuisance flooding) and other sea level rise impacts, responses to sea level rise, and resource and data needs.
The Office of Infrastructure published a report that presents case studies that examine the resilience of infrastructure to extreme events and includes assessments of sensitivity of a range of transportation projects recently built in national parks to (mostly) higher design flows. Projects include two bridge structures, a small culvert, a curb and paved ditch, an aquatic organism passage (AOP) structure, a large culvert, bank stabilization, and a storm water drainage system.
FHWA published a report that synthesized lessons learned and innovations from a variety of recent FHWA studies and pilots to help transportation agencies address resilience concerns at the asset level in engineering-informed adaptation studies in 2017.
Transportation Engineering Approaches to Resiliency(October 2015) The objective of this project is to develop recommended engineering practices for identifying and evaluating project-level vulnerabilities from future extreme weather events and changing conditions, and designing solutions to respond and adapt to those vulnerabilities. Engineering analyses of a diverse set of transportation assets around the country were performed in order to identify best practices for improving the resiliency of the transportation system. The result will be a cross-cutting set of recommendations for engineering practice to cover a wide range of facility types and locations.
FHWA published, in 2014, an 11-step process for analyzing adaptation measures during the engineering analysis of transportation facilities and a range of case studies of documenting application of the approach.
Highways in the Coastal Environment: Hydraulic Engineering Circular Number 25 – 3rd edition(January 2020) – This coastal engineering reference manual for highway engineers includes technical guidance and methods for assessing the vulnerability of roads and bridges to extreme events, focusing on sea level rise, storm surge, and waves. It also addresses the science behind coastal processes including sediment transport, waves and tides; introduces a range of common threats to coastal highways (including waves, erosion, sea level rise, overwashing, storm surge and scour); and, discusses methods to analyze and resolve those threats and develop potential solutions.
Freight Resilience Planning in the Face of Environmental Disruption (June 2022) - The purpose of this research is to summarize the state of the practice for freight resiliency planning. Freight planning by public sector agencies is still a relatively new discipline. Given thatcurrent and future environmental conditions is causing more frequent and more severe extreme weather events and that these events are increasingly disrupting the movement of goods and services across the United States, this research provides a summary of current practices, methods, and gaps in freight resiliency planning to inform the development and improvement of freight resiliency planning to address extreme weather risks.
FAQ: Emergency Relief Program and Resilience(January 2017) - Explains that FHWA emergency relief funds may be used to rebuild damaged highways to be more resilient to future extreme weather events if cost effective or consistent with current design standards. (PDF 300 KB)
