Quantifying Road Criticality Through the Impact of Natural Hazard Disruptions

When a natural hazard closes a road, the repair bill counts the damage to the infrastructure. What about the longer journeys, the canceled trips, and the added emissions that road users absorb every day the road stays shut?

The session will present a methodology for accounting for the indirect impacts of natural hazard events on road networks, and for combining that analysis with natural hazard models. The discussion will examine how measuring these wider impacts changes the picture of which road links are most critical, and how that evidence can support more accurate estimates of economic loss. Participants will gain insights into how to use this evidence to target resilience investments as hazard events increase in frequency and magnitude.

For Southeast Asia, where a single closed road can cut off communities and disrupt supply chains for weeks, knowing which links matter most helps governments decide where to spend limited resilience budgets first.

The session is part of ADB's Green Roads Webinar Series, which examines the nature-positive benefits of green roads and highlights their cross-cutting contributions to decarbonization, climate resilience, water management, biodiversity, disaster risk reduction, and inclusive growth.