Transport infrastructure in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) is vulnerable to climatechange impacts. As detailed further below, climate-related hazards (e.g., sea level rise, stormsurge, increased temperatures) can damage individual transport facilities such as ports andairports, which can in turn disrupt transport services and cripple small island economies.Strategies to reduce these risks can come from both top-down approaches—such as nationalpolicies and plans to increase overall resilience—and bottom-up approaches—such as facility-specific engineering enhancements or operational changes to prevent damage.This report provides information to help SIDS increase the resilience of their transportinfrastructure, with a focus on ports and airports.
The report was developed for UNCTAD under the United Nations Development Account project“Climate change impacts on coastal transport infrastructure in the Caribbean: Enhancing theadaptive capacity of Small Island Developing States.”
This project included two parallel efforts:
- two national case studies focused on coastal transport infrastructure vulnerability in Jamaica and Saint Lucia, and
- the development of a transferable methodology for such vulnerability assessments in Caribbean SIDS.
This report is the culmination of the second effort.
The report is organized as follows:
- Section II describes the importance of understanding and addressing climate change vulnerability of the transport sector in SIDS.
- Section III provides key take-aways from the Jamaica and Saint Lucia case studies.
- Section IV provides a framework for climate change vulnerability assessment of SIDSports and airports. The framework includes multiple options for working with availabledata to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, as well as information on identifying andselecting adaptation strategies.
- Section V is an Appendix, with supplemental materials including:
- Definitions of key terms
- An example stakeholder tracking table
- A summary of data needs and priorities
- An overview of climate model data available for the Caribbean
- An overview of sea level rise projections
- Examples of several port and airport climate change vulnerability assessments
- Summary of a beach erosion and retreat analysis from the Saint Lucia case study.
The information throughout this report draws on examples of vulnerability assessments andadaptation strategies from around the world, in addition to the two SIDS case studies conductedunder this project.
These two case studies focus on climate change impacts on coastal transport
infrastructure and provide several lessons that inform both national-level and facility-leveladaptation planning.
