Climate Change Adaptation

Background

Climate change impacts on natural grounds and geotechnical constructions are expected to differ substantially throughout Europe. This is related to variations in expected climate change, to topographical and geological variations as well as to differences in geotechnical design and construction practices in European countries.

Objective

The Climate Change Adaptation working group wants to highlight climate change impacts on natural ground and geotechnical constructions. This will be done by sharing existing knowledge and by identifying knowledge gaps. The aim is to find what are the most relevant impacts on geotechnical structures because of climate change, and how we should deal with this challenge. Risk assessment and monitoring for climate change impacts have been identified as common focus areas.
The working group started in April 2018. The group meets at least twice a year for identifying and follow-up topics that are defined in the project.

Important documents

The Climate Change Adaptation working group has conducted a survey on the significance of climate change impacts on geo-structures, distributed mainly among geotechnical societies in the ELGIP member countries. A paper including the survey results, the content of national strategies for climate adaptation related to geotechnical structures and examples of climate change adaptation strategies have been published in MDPI Geosciences.

Additionally, the group has studied the feasibility of applying nature-based solutions as climate-adaptive landslide risk mitigation measures  (conference paper prepared for ISGSR 2025).

Recently, the group has provided a modular conceptual and operational framework to support best-practice quantitative geotechnical analysis and design of climate-adaptive geo-structures (journal paper published in the Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment).

The available documents are all linked below. 

• Paper: Climate Change Adaptation of Geo-Structures in Europe: Emerging Issues and Future Steps
• Survey questionnaire: Survey on the significance of climate change impacts on geo-structures across EU countries
• Results of the survey
• Conference paper: Climate-adaptivity of landslide risk mitigation measures: framework and preliminary validation
• Journal paper: A framework for climate-adaptive geotechnical analysis and design