Held on 12 May 2026 at Excel London, the session—available here: View session details—highlighted CIHT’s growing body of work on climate action, focusing on both decarbonisation and resilience across transport networks.

Chaired by Justin Ward, CIHT Head of Policy and Technical Practice, the session brought together leading industry voices including Juan Sebastián Cañavera Herrera, Senior Sustainability Engineer at Foster + Partners, and Dr Kim Yates, Director – Climate Change and Sustainability at Mott MacDonald.

Putting CLIMATES into action

The session formed part of CIHT’s wider CLIMATES initiative – Changing Landscapes for Infrastructure and Mobility: Assessing Transport and Environment Scenarios – which seeks to define how the sector should respond to climate change in the short and long term.

As set out in CIHT CLIMATES resource, the initiative is built around a central question:

In an uncertain world, what priority actions in highways and transportation should we double-down on in the next three years?

The programme highlights two defining challenges for transport professionals:

• the need for rapid reduction of carbon emissions, and
• the need to adapt networks to become more resilient to the accelerating impacts of climate change

These themes were central to the Futurebuild session, which explored how climate impacts are already affecting transport systems and what practical actions can be taken now.

Climate change: unavoidable and urgent

Drawing on the session insights presented by the CIHT speakers emphasised that climate change is unavoidable, with outcomes ranging from manageable to severe depending on global action.

The discussion reinforced the need for a dual approach to climate action:

• Mitigation – stopping and reversing emissions
• Adaptation – responding to and managing the impacts of a changing climate

The session also highlighted that resilience must be understood broadly. It is not simply about protecting assets, but about ensuring systems can resist, absorb, adapt and recover from shocks, reflecting internationally recognised definitions of resilience.

Spotlight on the speakers

Juan Sebastián Cañavera Herrera – resilience and adaptation in practice

Juan Sebastián Cañavera Herrera focused on how transport infrastructure must be understood as part of complex socio‑technical systems, where climate risks are interconnected across sectors.

Using a systems thinking approach, he demonstrated how climate hazards such as flooding, heat and storms can create cascading risks, including:

• disruptions to power supply and telecommunications
• impacts on drainage and flood risk systems
• failures in supporting infrastructure and asset condition

The presentation highlighted the importance of:

• identifying interdependencies across infrastructure systems
• embedding resilience into planning and asset management
• using tools such as adaptation pathways to manage uncertainty

Key messages included the need to move beyond isolated interventions and adopt a system-wide response to climate risk.

Dr Kim Yates – linking climate risk to transport performance

Dr Kim Yates explored how the delivery of transport services is intrinsically linked to climate conditions, with impacts across:

• people – staff and customers
• activities – road and rail operations
• assets – damage to infrastructure
• supporting infrastructure – including power failures

Her presentation emphasised that a well-adapting transport system should:

• use the latest climate projections
• embed adaptation across organisations
• take risk-based decisions
• prioritise flexibility and learning

The session also introduced approaches such as:

• systems thinking to identify hidden climate risks
• adaptation pathways to plan responses over time
• the use of KPIs to demonstrate the value of resilience investment

From insight to action

The session reinforced a number of practical priorities aligned with CIHT’s wider policy work, including:

• embedding resilience into all levels of decision-making
• ensuring maintenance funding supports long-term network performance
• improving risk assessment and resilience planning
• strengthening leadership and guidance across the sector

These echo key recommendations from CIHT’s CLIMATES work and wider resilience guidance, which call for urgent and coordinated action across government, industry and professional bodies.

A shared challenge for the sector

Futurebuild 2026 provided an important platform for CIHT to bring its CLIMATES insights to a wider audience across the built environment.

The session demonstrated that addressing climate change is not a single-issue challenge, but one that requires:

• collaboration across sectors
• integration of mitigation and adaptation
• and a shift towards system-level thinking in transport planning and investment

As the CLIMATES initiative shows, the transport sector has a critical role to play in both reducing emissions and enabling resilient, sustainable futures.

CIHT presenting at Futurebuild 2026