Climate change risks and bridge design

Climate change can have substantial impacts on the safety and performance of infrastructure systems. Understanding these impacts is of paramount importance, especially for long-lived infrastructure elements, such as bridge structures. This chapter focuses on discussing the impacts of climate change to bridges and describes a conceptual framework as a guide for bridge designers on how to consider these impacts in bridge design. Several existing challenges are, however, highlighted that hinder the application of such a framework in practical contexts (e.g., climate change data availability and uncertainty). Overcoming these challenges is necessary to facilitate a rational consideration of climate change impacts in the design of bridge infrastructure. Although the current chapter mainly addresses bridges, the identified risks and proposed framework can be extended to other types of infrastructures and infrastructure elements.