国际英语资讯:Adaptation of transport infrastructure to climate change discussed in Athens_时事

国际英语资讯:Adaptation of transport infrastructure to climate change discussed in Athens

"The climate is not changing or will change; it has already changed, and we'll have to adapt to those changes if we wish to have a resilient transport infrastructure," Alexopoulos warned.

UNECE established a group of experts who are working on the climate change impacts and adaptation for transport networks in 2010.

"For the first time, we put a geographical information system (GIS) in all the critical transport infrastructure...with the projections from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) on the different climatic factors like precipitation, floods, winds and high temperature," Kostas Alexopoulos, Chief of Transport Facilitation and Economics, Sustainable Transport Division in UNECE explained to Xinhua.

"Now we invite the governments to use this information, to be part of our group of experts and help us identify those areas or locations or those parts of the networks that might be vulnerable in the future to climate change impacts," Alexopoulos said.

The Greek government has put the management of climate change fallout high on its policy agenda.

"We have to move forward with specific infrastructure projects. And we have to look for other sources, such as bringing in the picture renewing our bus fleet with electric fleet, something that we're going to do in the next six months," Konstantinos Karamanlis, Greek Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, told Xinhua.