(TLP:CLEAR) Community Lifelines Awareness: Transportation Sector Challenges from Climate Change

Summary: Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization, recently published “Explainer: Climate Change and Transportation,” providing an overview of the challenges posed by shifting climate patterns on an interdependent critical infrastructure sector. As highlighted by the report, the transportation sector includes roads, railroads, bridges, ports, and more, which face increasing stress due to the effects of climate change. For example, in 2025 a climate change-driven heat wave caused roads to buckle in multiple states and train tracks to warp across the East Coast. Impacts to transportation infrastructure are not just caused by temperature extremes but also by effects like heavy rainfall that bring flooding and structural damage and sea level rise that worsens erosion and high tide flooding in coastal areas.

Analyst Note: In addition to the 2025 heat wave described in the Climate Central report, roads buckled and authorities suspended public transit services during a 2021 heat wave that spread across portions of the interior of California, the Southwest, and the central Great Basin, as WaterISAC reported on at the time. Recognizing the importance of the transportation sector to the water and wastewater sector, WaterISAC regularly reports on impacts to roads, bridges, and more whenever there is a major natural disaster in the U.S. The transportation sector also relies on the water and wastewater sector, making them interdependent on one another. As a reflection of the importance of these sectors to one another and to other sectors, FEMA included both in its Community Lifelines construct, which covers critical infrastructure sector functions that “[enable] the continuous operation of critical government and business functions and [are] essential to human health and safety or economic security.” Given the critical role transportation plays in enabling the functioning of all sectors, WaterISAC encourages its members to become familiar with how this other community lifeline works, to include its challenges and the potential impacts it might have on water and wastewater utilities in case of degradations and disruptions.

Original Source: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/climate-change-and-transportation-2026

Additional Reading:

• FEMA Community Lifelines
• CISA Transportation Systems Sector

Mitigation Recommendations:

• FEMA Guidance for Response and Recovery to Climate Change
• FEMA Community Lifelines Implementation Toolkit

Related WaterISAC PIRs: 16, 17, & 18