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Transport Efficiency Promotes Development and Protects the Environment
far the maintenance spending required to avoid them (Foster and BricenoGarmendia 2010). Climate change will increase demand for maintenance services to ensure that transport services stay reliable. The follow-on effects of increased landslides, flash floods, and erosion of land transport services will also require expansion of emergency services to avoid long interruptions. Because emergency services are often financed from maintenance budgets, more weather-related emergencies would worsen maintenance fiscal deficits (World Bank 2010c). Because the consequences of climate change for transport will vary greatly among geoclimatic regions, adaptation must be specific to local conditions. The smaller the geographic area, the more uncertain are any predictions related to climate change, and fine-tuning current climate models will not entirely eliminate the uncertainty. Recurrent assessments of weather-related risks should generate as needed new regulatory frameworks, new institutions, and new policies. The process should periodically produce an action plan, updated in the light of new information on local climate conditions and the consequences for transport (Fay, Ebinger, and Block 2010). The higher demand for maintenance may alter the tradeoff between capital investment and maintenance. The higher costs of more resilient new investment could bring high future savings in retrofitting or more frequent and costly maintenance. Resolving this tradeoff depends on institutional changes to increase maintenance capacity. The longevity of transport infrastructure calls for a long planning horizon and a process to update decision rules for investing in infrastructure. A first low-cost step is to change the decision rules for locating new facilities. Assessing rising risks from changing weather conditions and avoiding high-risk sites is economical insurance against climate-related disruptions. But inertia in planning locations can have very high costs. Inundations of more than one meter completely destroy roads. With its current location decisions, for example, Bangladesh risks losing more than 10,000 km of roads (Dasgupta and others 2010). The biggest challenge for long-term infrastructure planning is to avoid looking only at the past. Because local climates can change abruptly, past changes may not inform what might happen. Standard updating procedures—based on recording weather events and revising the probabilities of their occurrence—can distract from crucial adaptation measures. What is needed are decision tools that can incorporate information from forward-looking nonlinear models. Robust decision making, a process designed for use when probability distributions are unknown, gives proper attention to the possibility of high-impact events even if there is a very low probability that they will occur (Lempert and Collins 2007). In the longer run, new building codes need to counter short-termism and the temptation to save on capital expenditures. Short-termism manifests itself in overdiscounting the future costs of retrofitting or replacement. New standards can be put in place if new facilities are built and there is progress in predicting climate change (Meyer 2008). Turning the Right Corner • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9835-7