RECONNECT - Resilience of Islands and Remote Communities to Transport Disruption

Businesses and communities on islands and remote mainland areas are highly dependent on the strategic transport system to provide them with access to businesses, customers and key services located in more densely populated areas. This transport system is vulnerable to disruption because of ageing transport assets (e.g., infrastructure, ferries) and increasingly severe weather events as a result of climate change. Moreover, growing inter-dependencies between the transport system and other infrastructure networks (e.g. electricity, tele-communications) increase the risk of concurrent or cascading failures. The vulnerability of remote/island areas to transport disruption is particularly acute either because there are no alternative transport links, or the alternatives that do exist are co-located and exposed to the same risks, or they involve long detours, often with restrictions on vehicle size or weight, or with limited capacity.
At present, we have only a limited understanding of the size and nature of the social, economic and environmental impacts of transport disruption because routinely published secondary data is too coarse-grained to be able to identify impacts at the desired spatial scale and there have been no opportunistic research studies carried out during previous transport disruptions. However, we do know from media reports/articles [3], from questionnaire surveys carried by representative bodies [4] and from the analysis carried out by individual companies [5] that the impacts are significant, particularly when disruption is prolonged.
Furthermore, since economic and social networks in remote/island areas are intricately connected, the impacts of disruption are experienced not only by transport system users, but also by those who rely on the transport system to supply them with goods or services, or to enable others to access goods or services provided by them. These indirect impacts have the potential to propagate through these supply chains in ways...