Impact of Climate Change on Pavement Performance: Preliminary Lessons Learned through the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet)

The Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet) was established to develop collaborative networks and platforms needed to integrate the multidisciplinary areas of climate change, pavement design and performance, and economics. Preliminary network activities, described in this paper, have rapidly expanded our knowledge of pavement performance under future climates and provide insights for future research. Specifically, increases in the frequency and/or severity of many types of extreme weather events have already been observed; projected future changes in air temperature, rainfall, sea level rise and hurricanes on pavement performance are significant; and future costs are expected to increase very significantly and non-linearly. Combining these findings, we offer a set of recommendations for future research to address our key research question: How does climate non-stationarity differentially impact transportation infrastructure design, performance and life span