Abstract Manager

Starting in the early 2000s, British Columbia’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure began examining the potential affects of climate change, establishing technical guidance for application during infrastructure project design. Working with national agencies and scientists, the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee (PIEVC) risk assessment was developed.

The approach has been refined over the years and a new approach, Climate Risk Workshops, is being applied to the Cariboo Road Recovery Projects, a program which is restoring road and highway access at 10 sites in central B.C. significantly affected by slides and washouts in 2020 and 2021.

In Climate Risk Workshops for each of the projects, climate hazards, likelihood and risks are evaluated for individual elements within the project. Additionally, cascading hazards are identified and assessed for each element. Designs are evaluated on their climate adjusted design criteria and additional sensitivity analysis is conducted to reduce uncertainty in design input parameters where data generated from climate model projections are either limited or uncertain.

This presentation will speak to the following: the shortcomings of past climate risk assessment tools; the unique challenges on Cariboo Road Recovery Projects that led to the development and use of these Climate Risk Workshops; and the application of the tool on Highway 97 at Cottonwood Hill, a $335 million project that includes stabilizing a stretch of an essential north-south highway affected by a significant slow-moving landslide that reawakened in 2020.