Extreme weather, increased temperatures, and sea level rise threaten investments in transportation infrastructure. Hence, resilience is becoming an increasingly critical consideration for highway and transportation engineers. National efforts towards more resilient infrastructures begin with a documented commitment and policy. FHWA issued Order 5520: Transportation System Preparedness and Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events to establish FHWA policy and responsibilities. The order serves to establish FHWA’s policy and approach to addressing these risks. Therefore, it is time to discuss incorporation of resilience into the design and decision-making procedures.

Pavement resilience is becoming an increasingly critical consideration for highway and transportation engineers. Federal Executive Order 13990 identifies the need for the world to be put on a sustainable climate pathway and Federal Executive Order 14008 identifies innovation, commercialization, and deployment of clean energy technologies and infrastructure in a government-wide approach as a way to increase resilience to climate change. Indications from recent United States Congressional Appropriation Acts and supporting congressional reports demonstrate a growing expectation that resilience will be directly incorporated into future pavement design, construction, and maintenance processes. Meanwhile, pavement asset managers have already been asked to incorporate risk to natural threats including climate change in their state Transportation Asset Management Plans.

Agencies across the country, have been concerned about the impact of climate change and how to make pavement resilient to withstand the effect. Many states have a number of legislative initiatives directing various agencies to ensure that resiliency is incorporated into their business practice. This, coupled with the increasing awareness of climate change, has provided momentum to the resiliency effort. As a result, many agencies across the country have been actively engaged in numerous tasks to address various aspects of design, construction, and maintenance in order to ensure resiliency. Although there are a lot of work/studies/research going on by various entities, there is not much guidance available for the state transportation agencies to address the issue in a more consistent manner. In absence of that guidance, agencies struggle to plan and implement effective measures. This may also lead the agencies to duplicate the efforts resulting in unnecessary wastage of resource and time. This pooled funded project will provide a platform for agencies to share common issues, exchange agency plans with each other and eventually help agencies develop their resilience plan with minimum effort by avoiding redundancies. Since resilience covers a lot of the DOT’s groups, having a pooled fund with all these different focus areas could lead to difficulty in drafting a scope of common interest, which would tend to prohibit coherence in the deliverables. Therefore, various design, construction, and maintenance aspects involving pavement and geotechnical assets (such as embankments, slope etc.) have been chosen as the focus area of this pooled fund study.

This pooled fund study seeks to support and showcase the research, development, and implementation of resilience approaches in the areas of pavement and geotechnical design, maintenance, preservation, and rehabilitations by various state DOTs. This would also provide platform for the agencies to share ideas and plans related to resiliency that would eventually help agencies to implement their resilience plans without duplicate and wasteful efforts.

The following tasks comprise the anticipated scope of this pooled fund study:

• Perform a literature review of resilience efforts by various agencies in the area of pavement and geotechnical design, maintenance, rehabilitation, and preservation.
• Facilitate exchange of ideas related to incorporation of resilience in business practice within the realm of design, maintenance, rehabilitation, and preservation of pavement and geotechnical assets.
• Help DOTs develop and/or refine their plans to address resilience through idea sharing and exchange.
• Identify the gap between practice and concept and provide guidance for implementation minimizing that gap.
• Develop any appropriate research needs statement(s) that will help DOTs with their resilience action plans with specific focus on practical or implementable solutions.

Deliverables

• Arrange and conduct peer exchange with agencies for sharing ideas, plans, implementation etc. 
• Arrange and conduct webinars and workshops with specific themes and showcasing successful resilience approaches and case studies.
• Undertake studies out of the RNSs developed.
• Develop report outlining the best practice approaches and recommendations based on literature review and peer exchange.

The annual commitment is $20,000 per DOT. Travel costs for two representatives per  participating agency are expected to be covered by the annual commitment. A matching funds waiver to allow for 100% SP&R funding for this study will be pursued; however, if the waiver is not approved then the standard 80/20 participation ratio will apply. Initially, this is expected to be a 5-year effort. A minimum participation of five agencies is desired, but additional agencies are always welcomed. For additional information, please feel free to reach out to Amir Golalipour of FHWA at amir.golalipour@dot.gov or Shabbir Hossain of VDOT at shabbir.hossain@vdot.virginia.gov.