Postgraduate research opportunities 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, from questionnaire surveys carried by representative bodies and from the analysis carried out by individual companies 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 which are hard to predict without a detailed understanding of how they function. Indeed, the most significant impacts may be experienced by potentially fragile individuals or organisations which are several connections removed from disrupted transport system users.

This project aims to investigate the vulnerability and resilience of businesses and communities in remote/island areas to transport disruption. The project will develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature and severity of impacts on individual actors and will reveal dependencies between actors exposed directly or indirectly to transport disruption within the affected area. The extent to which impacts are dispersed throughout the affected area, and the resilience of actors (individually and collectively) to cope with or adapt to disruption will also be explored.

A mixed methods approach combining will be used to gain insight into the relationship between disruption characteristics and the impacts on a diverse range of businesses and communities. A combination of interviews, focus groups and surveys will be employed to collect primary data. Key research challenges will be the design of a data collection processes to support the assessment of and the relationship between direct and indirect impacts resulting from a reduction in external accessibility, and the development of a suitable approach to test the impact of various disruption scenarios on selected remote/island communities.

The research output will provide transport authorities with the means to evaluate the risk to remote/island communities from disruption, and to identify the most critical parts of the transport network, thereby supporting the more effective use of limited public funds with which to adapt the network to existing and emerging hazards. The output will also enable communities and businesses to identify existing/future vulnerabilities and opportunities to strengthen their resilience.