Proactive Adaptation of Rail Infrastructure to Accelerated Climate Change

Accelerating climate change creates deep uncertainty and new challenges for the strategic management of rail infrastructure. A paradigm for managing this infrastructure under conditions of such uncertainty is proposed, based on a proactive approach to solving these problems. Under this paradigm, a strategic vision for the future is created, short-term actions are regulated, and a regulatory framework is created to allocate investments to adapt the rail infrastructure to these changes. A model and an algorithm have been developed to predict and plan the volume of such investments with incomplete statistical data. A model and an algorithm have been developed for the distribution of these investments. The developed models and algorithms were used to manage weather and climate risks of the transport infrastructure of JSC Russian Railways in a changing climate for the period until 2050.