Europe's transport infrastructure is not ready to face climate change

Abstract. Climate extremes are intensifying in frequency and severity, posing escalating risks to Europe's transport infrastructure. Over the past two decades, these events have caused physical damages, economic losses, user delays, and rising health emergencies. Here, we first review observed impacts of selected climate extremes on Europe’s transport network. We then present an analysis that accounts for multiple hazards, designed to be intuitive and accessible for policymakers, to quantify the increasing exposure of four transport modes to river floods, heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires. We find that climate extremes are already affecting all transport modes across large parts of Europe, with billions of euros of economic damage even for single events. One prominent example is the 2018 Rhine River drought, which is highlighted as a case study in this analysis and resulted in EUR 2.4 billion in economic losses in Germany. Under the medium-high emissions scenario Representative Concentration Pathway 6.0 (RCP6.0), which approximates the trajectory of current climate policies, exposure of European transport infrastructure to climate extremes is projected to increase. Heatwaves exposure could increase up to 30 times by mid-century (2040–2069) compared to historical conditions (1980–2009). Droughts could affect more than 50 % of inland waterways for the first time by mid-century in this scenario. By the end of the century (2070–2099), railways and roads are projected to face up to 26 times as many wildfires compared to the historical period and exposure to river floods is projected to increase locally up to 8 times. Mitigation efforts aligned with a low-emissions scenario (RCP2.6) demonstrate clear benefits, reducing EU-mean transport mode exposure to all hazards, especially to droughts and heatwaves, for which the mean increase in exposure compared to the historical conditions is already reduced by 22 %–30 % by mid-century. Urgent action is needed to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s transport network and address emerging climate challenges. A combination of ambitious mitigation and adaptation strategies is essential to ensuring their long-term functionality in a changing climate.