Dive Brief:
- The Federal Highway Administration awarded a combined $829.6 million in grants to 80 projects that seek to protect transportation infrastructure from climate change threats, the agency announced Thursday.
- Projects receiving federal funding include replacing and rehabilitating bridges in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Philadelphia; regrading a road that crosses Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; and using cool pavement technologies on roads in Davis, California, to combat extreme heat, the agency said.
- “Extreme weather driven by climate change is one of the biggest threats to our infrastructure, to quality of life and safety in our communities,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a media call Thursday. “And it's not an exaggeration to say that extreme weather related to climate change is one of the biggest risks to our supply chains.”
Source: Federal Highway Administration
Dive Insight:
Extreme weather is the single biggest risk to supply chains in 2024, according to Everstream Analytics. And it didn’t take long for those effects to be felt: Several trucking executives described the toll weather took on their operations in the first month of the year.
In rolling out the grants, Buttigieg noted wildfires shutting down freight rail lines in California, mudslides closing a highway in Colorado, a drought halting barge traffic on the Mississippi River and subways being flooded in New York.
“That's why today we are proud to announce a major initiative to address those threats and keep American lives and livelihoods safe,” Buttigieg said.
The first-of-their-kind grants come from a discretionary transportation resilience program created as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. They included four categories:
- Resilience improvement grants: Thirty-six projects will receive about $621 million to enhance the resilience of existing roads by improving drainage, relocating roadways, elevating bridges or other upgrades.
- At-risk coastal infrastructure: Eight projects will receive approximately $119 million to protect, strengthen or relocate coastal highway and non-rail infrastructure.
- Planning grants: Twenty-six projects will receive about $45 million to develop resilience-improvement plans, resilience planning and other design and planning initiatives.
- Community resilience and evacuation routes: Ten projects will receive approximately $45 million for improvements to evacuation routes.
“This program will help ensure that our nation's roads bridges and highways are resilient enough to withstand extreme weather like floods, fires and mudslides and work to harden our infrastructure will create well paying jobs along the way,” Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt said on the call.
