Review of 120-plus UK transport plans finds big gaps in climate resilience rules

A study published in npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport examines more than 120 documents setting out the policies, programmes and roadmaps behind UK transport strategy at the national, regional and local level. According to the authors, national plans concentrate on zero-emission vehicles, autonomous systems and digital technologies. They pursue net zero through clean technologies, expanded electric vehicle infrastructure and the promotion of active travel.

Local strategies, the authors write, often operate in isolation. They put net-zero targets first and give little weight to what climate change does to the resilience and deterioration of the infrastructure itself.

The paper frames the stakes in economic terms. Well-functioning transport networks cut direct costs for individuals and businesses by smoothing the flow of people and goods, and better connectivity deepens labour markets. The authors argue that UK planning often overlooks the integrated management of decarbonisation, resilience and asset strategy, and that the resulting gaps threaten long-term infrastructure reliability.

The authors report significant gaps in resilience standards, metrics and statutory targets, and they say those gaps undermine effective asset management. That matters most to the person running a highway authority's maintenance programme or a contractor pricing long-term upkeep work. Without agreed metrics, resilience could struggle to hold its place in budget decisions that run on numbers.

The roads still carry most trips

The paper's introduction starts from how people actually travel. Private vehicles account for the majority of trips and distances travelled across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Put those shares next to the national priorities and the tension is plain. Zero-emission vehicles and EV charging change what drives on the roads. They don't change how exposed the road, the drainage under it or the bridge it crosses are to heat, flooding or wear.

For logistics and fleet operators who rely on road freight, this suggests decarbonisation plans and network reliability are being written on separate tracks. Anyone modelling route risk over a 10- or 20-year horizon has reason to read local transport plans for what they say about asset condition, not just charging rollout.

Asset management without a target to manage to

Asset management is the discipline of deciding when to maintain, renew or replace infrastructure over its whole life. It depends on things that can be measured: a condition standard, a performance metric, a target someone is accountable for. Net zero has those in UK transport strategy. The review indicates resilience mostly doesn't, at least not in a form that is standardised or written into statute.

Across more than 120 UK transport plans, carbon gets the targets, while the existing network that carries most journeys gets a much thinner scorecard for climate risk. In practice that could tilt spending toward new projects whose benefits fit existing targets, and away from proactive work on ageing assets whose benefits are harder to put in a business case.

The methods for measuring climate risk are not new. A 2015 World Bank report by Jane Olga Ebinger and Nancy Vandycke, Moving Toward Climate-Resilient Transport, set out a framework for integrating climate resilience into transport systems. It catalogued engineering approaches to vulnerability assessment, systematic condition assessment through vulnerability and risk assessment, cost-risk assessment under a given climate change scenario and robust decision making under uncertainty.

The same report covered screening tools for climate and disaster risk at the early stages of investment, plus a participatory process for prioritising resilience work on Belize's transport network. Read alongside the UK review, that suggests the shortfall is less about missing techniques than about missing standards and statutory targets that would make plans use them.

The reading has limits. A document review measures what plans say, and an authority's engineers may already be doing resilience work that never makes it into a strategy paper. The paper doesn't argue against the net-zero push either. Its proposed conceptual framework integrates resilience and sustainability, balancing new development with proactive management of existing assets. As a framework it is conceptual, so it sets out what planning should cover rather than handing councils a ready-made metric.

The review comes from inside DARe

This review is one of the hub's own outputs. The accepted manuscript on UCL Discovery is filed as the DARe transport strategies review. Its 20 authors, led by Manu Sasidharan of the University of Cambridge, include DARe investigators Jennifer Schooling, Abir Al-Tabbaa, Phil Greening, Roberto Palacin, Stephanie Glendinning and Phil Blythe. The University of Cambridge repository lists sponsorship from UK Research and Innovation under grant EP/Y024257/1.

Heriot-Watt University describes the Research Hub for Decarbonised Adaptable and Resilient Transport Infrastructures, known as DARe, as an EPSRC investment from September 2023 led by Newcastle University and closely aligned with the Heriot-Watt-led TransiT programme. It names Prof. Phil Blythe of Newcastle as project lead.

DARe's stated aim is to give decision-makers data, and visualisations of it, showing how transport is performing against resilience and decarbonisation goals now and in the future. Its systems models are meant to pinpoint vulnerabilities, quantify the risk of failure and let planners run what-if analysis on proposed investments.

According to the hub, planners will also be able to stress-test scenarios built around the big unknowns that will shape how well future transport systems work. It names climate change, population growth, and new materials and technologies among them. The target is a resilient, net-zero transport system by 2050.

The hub describes a system-of-systems approach that works across the same three scales the review examined, national, regional and local, and covers both existing and new transport infrastructure. That combination speaks directly to the review's finding that local plans work in isolation and neglect the deterioration of what is already built. The hub's work is split into five packages, four research and one management:

• WP1: co-created transport futures storylines, used to stress-test solutions at national, regional and local scale, including interactions between transport, power and digital infrastructure
• WP2: a transferable, open-source modelling framework, co-developed with and released to the wider community
• WP3: the physical effects of climate on infrastructure assets and what that does to whole-life management
• WP4: policy, socio-economic, behavioural and land-use implications
• WP0: hub management, governance and engagement

One detail deserves more attention than it gets. DARe explicitly sets out to find new vulnerabilities created by the net-zero transition itself, including dependencies on digital and power infrastructure. For operators electrifying depots or fleets, resilience then covers the grid connection and the data link as well as the road. A charging hub that loses power is a network failure too, even when the asphalt is fine.

The hub also says it will look at how transport delivers mobility to people and to the goods and services the economy relies on. That puts freight inside DARe's scope rather than at its edge, which is where fleet operators will want it.

The open-source model is the next marker

The hub says it shaped its research programme in consultation with civic partners in North East and North West England, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire & Heartland and Scotland. It also committed to opening the partnership to all, planned co-creation events in its first nine months to define scenarios and storylines jointly, and set up a DARe Flexible Fund to bring in the wider research community.

If those partners use the WP2 framework to stress-test real investment choices, resilience could gain the measurable footing the review says it lacks. If the framework stays in academic use, the gap stays where it is.

Planners who want the full argument should read the paper itself and pass it to the asset team. An open-access accepted version sits on UCL Discovery under a Creative Commons licence. The Cambridge repository copy is embargoed until October 2028.