Abstract Manager

This presentation focuses on the development and application of IDEAS, an Excel-based economic analysis tool designed to support climate adaptation and resilience decision-making for transportation infrastructure. The project was led by the BC Ministry of Transportation and Transit (MOTT) with funding from Natural Resources Canada. Tool development was undertaken by Stantec and informed by targeted literature review, engagement with interested parties, and alignment with existing decision-support and economic analysis approaches used by MOTT.

The presentation will describe how the IDEAS tool adapts conventional benefit-cost analysis (BCA) methods to better reflect the full range of impacts associated with climate-related disruptions to transportation infrastructure. It emphasizes the use of standardized, broadly available input data wherever possible to estimate monetized direct damages to infrastructure assets, as well as monetized indirect damages affecting highway users, the local economy, and the broader provincial economy. Additionally, the IDEAS tool captures non-monetizable impacts—such as social and community effects, environmental outcomes, and health-related implications—recognizing their relevance to resilience decision-making even where valuation is not feasible.

Features of the IDEAS tool include the ability to evaluate multiple disruptions associated with different hazards, compare multiple adaptation investments, incorporate jurisdiction-specific data, and calculate annualized costs and benefits. Studies report benefit-cost ratios for resilience investments ranging from 4:1 (Global Commission on Adaptation 2019) to 15:1 (Sawyer et al. 2022). Translating these findings to the project scale still remains a challenge. The IDEAS tool addresses this gap by providing users with a transparent and accessible approach to estimating resilience benefits at a project level.

Attendees will gain insight into how project-scale economic analysis can inform resilient infrastructure choices, including key methodological challenges and limitations of the tool.