Abstract Manager

Changing weather patterns contributed to hundreds of landslides and road washouts in the Cariboo region in 2020 and 2021. ​The Ministry of Transportation and Transit (MOTT) established the Cariboo Road Recovery Projects (CRRP) to restore access at ten sites from Williams Lake to north of Quesnel.​ Climate resilience has been identified as a key program objective to reduce risk to the transportation network in the area. To meet this objective, the project team developed an approach to climate resilience, which included:

• Risk assessment. The project completed various Climate Risk Workshops with designers from various technical disciplines. The workshops and risk assessment followed an approach aligned with the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee (PIEVC). They served to identify climate risks for the new infrastructure and inform the design.
• Climate resilience and design. In complement to the risk assessment, the project team developed more detailed guidelines to support designers in evaluating the impact of and incorporating climate change into their work, including the following key areas.  
  • Climate scenario selection: For designers to adequately size infrastructure for climate change, an important question is what conditions are expected over the operating life of the infrastructure. Guidance was developed to select between high and low climate change emissions scenarios.
  • Streamflow data, flood frequency analysis: ​Publicly available datasets were leveraged to estimate future streamflows under future climate change.  
  • Stormwater and drainage: IDF curves are a typical input to drainage design and rainfall-runoff models. On the CRRP, climate adjusted IDF curves were used in design.
  • Geotechnical / landslide assessment: With groundwater conditions being a significant vulnerability on the CRRP, accounting for climate change in subsurface conditions was a significant challenge. The CRRP teams tried novel approaches to account for climate change in slope stability. ​

As the projects near completion, we reflect on what worked well in meeting MOTT’s climate resilience objectives, and areas of opportunity for future projects.  As climate change increasingly impacts projects across the country, the approaches developed under the CRRP program will be of interest to planners and designers across the country.