The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Transportation Systems

Although climate change has fell from public recently, the continued higher temperatures in summer, rapidly melting ice cover in the Arctic, and the fires in the Amazon forests are alarming. In the United States, which has 22,680 km of coastline, climate change is expected to result in important changes in access via impacts to flooding, landslide hazards, and seasonal snowcover (Wigley 2015). Coastal counties of the U.S. are home to over 126 million people, or 40% of the nation's total population, yet the coast accounts for less than 10% of the nation's land mass. Given the factors of climate change, transportation systems may suffer greatly.