Climate adaptation for Zambia’s vital transport corridors

The challenge: understanding the climate risk and social inequality around crucial road networks

For communities in Zambia, roads are essential for connecting people and goods with schools, hospitals, and marketplaces. However, as the country regularly faces extreme heat stress and flooding, these lifelines can quickly become cut off, severely impacting communities. 

As the RDA integrates climate resilience as part of the Transport Corridors for Economic Resilience (TRACER) programme, it needed to better understand these potential risks. That includes gaining insight into which adaptation solutions would help address these risks and how upgrades to the road network would benefit all communities equally. 

The major challenge was collecting all the data needed to calculate the impacts of floods, extreme precipitation, drought, and other climate disasters on road users – and surrounding communities. 

The solution: comprehensive climate risk and spatial inequality assessments 

To enhance the resilience of Zambia’s Livingstone-Sesheke, Lusaka-Chongwe-Luangwa, and Serenje-Mpika transport corridors, GCA appointed Haskoning, in association with Lobelia Earth and Kiran & Musonda Associates, to assess climate risks and prioritise adaptation investments. 

We collaborated closely with the RDA and all other stakeholders, including the World Bank as financiers of the TRACER programme, to: 

• Understand current and future climate risks 
• Identify the most vulnerable assets 
• Offer an in-depth understanding of climate hazard variability
• Ensure access to critical services 

The results from our climate hazard assessment support continued efforts to understand climate risks and deploy adaptations. 

By identifying adaptation solutions focused on key hazards, the RDA can prioritise investments that enhance climate resilience in the design, operation, and maintenance of the road corridors. All while providing other co-benefits such as improved livelihoods, greater biodiversity, and enhanced social equality.  

To ensure investments would benefit all communities, we deployed our SPIN tool to identify potential spatial inequality. Using SPIN, we could see clearly how climate change impacts on roads would affect urban and rural communities differently, and how disruption would affect men and women. 

This kind of information is vital when it comes to transport network investment, as road disruption can impact social groups differently.  

Zambia sees significant social and economic impacts when roads are out of service, as the country is dealing with several challenges related to its road network. The country also experiences poverty, food and water scarcity, limited access to education and healthcare, and large disparities between urban and rural areas.  

These challenges can impact women more than men, so having more detailed knowledge is vital to help improve the mobility of women and enhance their livelihoods.  

We also suggested several potential nature-based solutions to curb climate risks while offering biodiversity co-benefits. These included solutions like active vegetation management to clear roadside shoulder and drainage, roadside planting for sequestration and shade, thinning grasslands to minimise fire risks, and water retention basins in upstream areas. 

The result: reduced climate risks and spatial inequality  

Thanks to our climate risk and spatial inequality assessments, the RDA has the information it needs to effectively select and deploy key mitigation measures and develop infrastructure to benefit local communities. 

These measures will help reduce climate risk across the three transport corridors evaluated.  

Estimates show the costs of implementing adaptation measures for the Lusaka-Chongwe-Luangwa road sections were between 20-90% more than the climate risk costs for just a single year. The Livingstone-Sesheke section saw measures worth approximately 400-700% of the quantified climate risks. 

These figures suggest that the measures could deliver return on investment in a matter of years by protecting against major climate risk impacts on the three transport corridors included in this project. 

Thanks to analysis from our SPIN tool, we could see that targeted investments could have a significant impact on boosting women’s inclusion in the economy.  

In many cases, we saw that women relied on specific segments of key highways to access critical facilities. That meant that the World Bank and RDA could achieve impact on social equality by focussing safety measures and lighting on those sections of road – while also ensuring climate resilience. 

Overall, the project allows for the World Bank and RDA to deliver targeted road network improvements that make the most of its budget, while ensuring transport corridors benefit the greatest number of people.