The Department for Transport (DfT) has published a new report detailing a conceptual economic framework for understanding and identifying resilience impacts appraising transport resilience.
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The Department for Transport (DfT) has published 'Economic Appraisal of Resilience in Transport,' a new research report which introduces a framework designed to provide a consistent and proportional approach for appraising resilience within transport analysis guidance (TAG).
The UK Government Resilience Framework (2022) and the 2025 Resilience Action Plan underscore the need for a more proactive, whole-system approach that better anticipates and manages disruption to the UK transport network. The report was developed by PA Consulting on behalf of DfT and addresses the need for a consistent approach for appraising resilience impacts within transport analysis guidance (TAG).
The framework defines resilience as the ability of the transport system to anticipate, withstand, recover from, adapt, and learn from a wide range of shocks and stresses. These include acute shocks such as extreme weather events, cyber incidents, and major accidents, as well as chronic stresses like ageing assets and climate change.
The proposed framework evaluates resilience across three key dimensions:
Strategic: Establishing a proportionate scope based on the scheme’s primary objectives.
Economic: Using an expected value approach to quantify avoided losses, including transport user delays and wider economic impacts.
Risk and Uncertainty: Show the role of probabilities and provide switching values, plus incident evidence.
CIHT has previously advocated for these developments, including in its own report, 'Delivering a Resilient Transport Network'. In that report, CIHT called for the UK government to provide "coherent and consistent guidance" to the sector to avoid fragmented, internal assessments based on conflicting assumptions.
The report reinforces the importance of embedding climate adaptation into asset management and network operations. As extreme weather events increase in frequency and intensity, having consistent measures of resilience will help transport organisations demonstrate the effectiveness of their interventions and protect the wider economy.
Read the full DfT research here.
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