The Pacific is quietly becoming the world's transport-resilience laboratory

Rising seas are forcing the hardest questions in infrastructure to be answered first - in the smallest places.

Spend enough time working on transport in the Pacific and you start to notice the same thing on almost every island. The runway, the port and the coastal road aren't "infrastructure" in the way we casually use the word back home. They're the entire lifeline.

There's no redundant route, no second airport an hour away, no rail alternative when the highway floods. And once you think through this, a lot of the assumptions we carry from other places go out the window.

That, to me, is the transport story and the place where we can make the most difference. Today we explore this in a bit more detail.

The context for the Pacific is clear.

Sea levels across much of the Pacific are rising at roughly twice the global average. For most countries that's an environmental consideration.

For a Pacific nation it's an operational one, because when a single airfield or coastal road is the only way in for tourists, medicine, freight and family, resilience stops being a line in the business case and becomes the business case.

In short, there is very little margin for a lifeline asset to fail.

Encouragingly, the money is starting to follow that logic. We are seeing this in three areas:

• The Pacific Aviation Investment Program has already rebuilt runways and terminals across countries including Kiribati, Samoa, the Solomons, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

• The World Bank's Pacific Climate Resilient Transport Program is putting some US$338 million into roads, maritime sites and airports across six nations, and

• ADB's next Civil Aviation Development Investment Project is lined up for approval this year.

After a decade of talking about adaptation, the sector is now firmly in the decade of pouring it - literally - into concrete:)

But here is what is evident:

You cannot copy-paste your way to resilience in the Pacific. And that, I think, is the key lesson to learn and the area of focus.

Take a simple, recurring example - the choice between electric and diesel for a critical vehicle or plant, at a time when every organisation quite rightly carries carbon commitments.

On a spreadsheet built for a mainland city, electric wins easily.

On a remote island the picture can invert: fuel consumption may be so low that the emissions saving is rounding error against the capital cost, while poor local fuel quality, salt-laden marine air that punishes electrical systems, specialist servicing that's a flight or a shipping cycle away, and batteries that need manufacturer support on a fixed cycle all add up to fragility in exactly the systems you most need to be dependable.

The "green" answer imported from elsewhere can, in context, can be an average one.

Good engineering in the pacific means designing for isolation, salt, heat and thin supply chains - not lifting a template that silently assumed none of them existed.

The same holds for the parts of the job we lazily call "soft," which in the Pacific are never soft at all.

Land can hinge on customary tenure that takes years to work through, so a site isn't a red line on a plan, it's a relationship built patiently over time. Community and accessibility aren't a consultation box near the end; get them wrong and the asset is resented, underused, or simply doesn't serve the people it was built for.

Resilience, done properly, is social infrastructure as much as physical.

The key thought for me - is how we need to make sure we don't get things wrong!

• You weigh whole-of-life against upfront cost honestly, because there's no money to waste.

• You test options against genuine fatal flaws, not just tidy weighted scores, because a single point of failure really can stall an economy.

• You design the road, the power supply and the runway as one system, because on an island they so obviously are one.

These are disciplines we talk about everywhere and practise properly almost nowhere - except here, where there's no choice.

Which is why I've come to think of the Pacific less as a place that receives infrastructure lessons and more as a place that's generating them. How do you keep a lifeline asset working in a climate moving faster than the design manuals? How do you decarbonise without importing fragility? How do you build with a community rather than at it?

Those are precisely the questions Auckland, Brisbane and Jakarta will be wrestling with in fifteen years. The Pacific is simply being made to answer them first, on a compressed timeline and a tight budget.

My recommendation is to watch where the big resilience programmes actually land, how the money gets spent, and - quietly - whether our profession can resist the temptation to helicopter in solutions that worked somewhere flatter, richer and further from the sea.

Because the most valuable thing we can carry back out of the Pacific isn't a design. It's the humility to design for the place you're actually in.

Till next time

Andrew

---

Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.

Planning a development? Find out in minutes whether you need a transport assessment with KA PreCheck™, or estimate your trips with the free KA Traffic Estimator™.