In 2018, the United States Forest Service and the United States Department of Transportation John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center completed the development of a guidebook to help Forest Service staff build and maintain a more resilient transportation network. This guidebook, the U.S. Forest Service Transportation Resiliency Guidebook: Addressing Climate Change Impacts on U.S. Forest Service Transportation Assets (available here: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/38737) provides two major frameworks for staff to use: one to identify climate change vulnerabilities within the Forest Service transportation network and the other to reduce transportation vulnerability to climate change.
The guidebook was developed by a team of planners, engineers, and scientists from the Volpe Center and the Forest Service. A working group of Volpe Center and Forest Service staff met monthly to guide the development of the guidebook and reviewed each section of the guidebook as they were completed. To develop the content and base it in practice, select Forest Service field staff were contacted and consulted to understand their issues, needs, and ideas to address climate change on their transportation networks. Once a full draft of the guidebook was ready, Volpe Center and Forest Service met at the Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina to apply its frameworks in the field. While effective, the group made a few improvements to the frameworks and issued a final version of the guidebook a few months later.
Over the course of this process, the authors found that to be as effective as possible, field staff wanted to see the frameworks illustratively filled-out step-by-step. Additionally, they wanted the guidebook to contain real-world examples and resource-constrained shortcut options wherever possible. These shortcut options acknowledged that many National Forests do not have the staff or funding available to do a deep dive into each step of the frameworks. Accordingly, the working group developed these shortcut options as an alternative to not doing anything at all.
In sum, the Forest Service believes that the guidebook can be a valuable way to prepare its infrastructure for climate change impacts in the coming decades. If accepted, this podium presentation will summarize the process followed to develop the guidebook, it will provide an overview of how to use the guidebook (including a discussion of examples and the value of the shortcut options), and how the guidebook can be an example, and even a starting point, for other agencies to address climate change impacts on a resource-constrained budget.