Infrastructure resilience is essential for safe, reliable and maintainable operations and customer experience, and includes a multitude of interdependencies. For example, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR)² has identified 11 areas (or ‘levers’) that, when applied, can improve weather resilience for earthworks and drainage. For this article, we’ve focused on two of these levers – ‘Whole Systems’ and ‘Neighbours & Catchment’. 

Building on WSP’s work with Network Rail to produce their Third Adaption Report, we recognise that rail infrastructure owners have a good understanding of weather-related risk areas to their assets.  The issue for decision makers is understanding and balancing the multi-layered complexity of options to determine where best to proactively focus attention and resources. Tools are therefore required to increase confidence in making decisions, fully understanding the implications and combined outcomes that are likely to result from any given intervention.

To identify solutions that can support these decision makers, we reached out to our Ecosystem Services and Water Management teams, who are at the leading edge of systems thinking and NBS. We explored how using selected, layered spatial data sets and GIS software analysis can help decision makers increase their understanding of risks and identify potential interventions at a wider landscape scale. This approach can result in making targeted, proactive changes to habitats (potentially outside of clients’ boundary ownership) that will significantly improve rail infrastructure resilience, particularly to prolonged or intense rain (identified in the ORR’s report as a significant factor to failures of the UK’s railway assets).

WSP’s NATURE Tool was developed with Ecosystems Knowledge Network, in partnership with Northumbria University and 30 industry partners and stakeholders, with funding support from Innovate UK. It uses an evidence-based scoring system to calculate impacts of projects and land-use interventions on natural capital performance (i.e., natural assets and the ecosystem services they provide). The NATURE Tool also complements the Biodiversity Metric 4.0 for assessing biodiversity net gain. 

Currently my team is using NATURE Tool to remedy landslide risks and increase the resilience of a major A-road scheme in Scotland through nature-based solutions. 

We’ve recently been investigating combining NATURE Tool with commonly used surface and ground water flood mapping tools to create a systems-wide, multi-factored dashboard to help understand the landscape-wide consequences of decisions. This could help decision makers identify NBS opportunities within or outside of their infrastructure boundaries, where they can influence the surrounding landscape to ultimately protect their assets from climate change risks. 

Using such layered data sets can also help identify direct and indirect benefits and provide quantifiable evidence for business cases and funding applications to deliver more sustainable land management that ultimately benefit our UK rail infrastructure.”

Successful infrastructure resilience will need collaborative and cooperative relationships with lineside neighbours and landowners, such as farmers. These key stakeholders need to be encouraged and incentivised to make sustainable changes that reduce risks to adjacent railway embankments or cuttings. 

Using our expertise and learning from other sectors, particularly the water sector, to identify high level risks and opportunities and provide a holistic, system-wide view, it will be possible to create integrated solutions in cooperation with key stakeholders. Using an evidence-based approach through multi-factored dashboards could also support stakeholder applications for government funding to make much-needed changes, such as increasing rainwater retention on farmland, by demonstrating the wider environmental benefits of proposals. 

A joined-up approach to decision making and planning will bring a more weather resilient future for UK rail infrastructure

Making decisions to improve infrastructure resilience to severe weather is complex. It needs to account for relationships between vegetation management, water management and earthworks management. It also needs to address wider UK rail objectives, such as delivering biodiversity net gain, supporting net zero commitments, as well as wider sustainability, social value and customer experience targets. 

WSP has the expertise and innovative tools to help infrastructure owners gain a better understanding of how rail assets fit within the wider landscape and the interrelated elements – from local topography to neighbours’ needs. This systems-wide approach to intervention planning balances multiple drivers around net zero, biodiversity net gain, budget constraints, reliability and increased risk of extreme weather events. Ultimately, it could save time and money and improve safety, as well as deliver substantial support to infrastructure owners’ wider objectives, requirements and reputations; alongside significant co-benefits for the environment and the people engaging with the network. 

¹ Network Rail’s Third Adaptation Report estimates that wind and flooding incidents cost £275m and £223m respectively between 2006/07 and 2020/21
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Network-Rail-Third-Adaptation-Report-December-2021.pdf 

² ORR 11 levers for earthworks and drainage weather resilience Earthworks and Drainage Weather Resilience - Targeted Assurance Review - 25 May 2021 (orr.gov.uk) 

If you’re a rail asset owner and want to know more about how WSP can help with improving weather resilience through ecosystems services, NBS and stakeholder engagement, please get in touch.