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Purpose – To investigate the potential impacts of future climate change in the United Kingdom on its road and rail networks.

Methodology/approach – The climate change impacts of increasing summer temperatures, decreasing winter temperatures, increased heavy precipitation, greater numbers of extreme weather events and rises in sea level are reviewed.

Findings – Surface transportation is the most exposed element to the localised impacts of climate change. High summer temperatures will result in road rutting, rail buckling and decreased thermal comfort, whereas more intense winter precipitation will cause flooding, landslips and bridge scour across all modes. For all impacts, it is the extreme events (e.g. heat waves and storms) that are potentially the most devastating. As shown, there are some positive climate change impacts. For example, in the case of winter maintenance, all transport networks stand to benefit.

Originality/value – In order for transport to react appropriately to the potential changes in climate, it is essential to understand how the road and rail networks may be affected and to build strategies for both adaptation and mitigation into plans for future developments for both modes.

Composite slabs are gaining wide acceptance in many countries as they lend themselves to faster, lighter and more economic in construction buildings. The strength of composite slabs system relies on the bonding action between the concrete and the steel deck, the shear connections and the cross-sectional resistance of steel beam. However, structural behaviour of composite slab is a complex phenomenon and therefore experimental study is often conducted to establish the actual strength of the structure under ultimate load capacity. The main objective of this study is to determine the structural behaviour of composite slab system until ultimate limit state. Total of two specimens are examined in order to obtain failure mechanism of the composite structure under full load capacity. A new design approach of composite slab for roofing system are proposed in this study to construct a composite slab system that can float in the water but not wash away by flood. The lightweight materials in this composite construction are cold-formed steel and foam concrete. The system focuses on the concept of Industrialised building system (IBS) to reduce the cost and construction time.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, India's tourism industry has the opportunity to further grow and expand through the development and implementation of sustainable policies. The diversity of India's geography is observed in its weather which is variable both spatially and temporally throughout the year. Seasonal changes in weather influence the number of foreign tourists arrivals in India. Consequently, significant reductions in visitor numbers are observed during the monsoon season. In future decades, the changing climate has the potential to shape tourism patterns. Warmer temperatures and an increased frequency of high-intensity rainfall are the two most common predictions concerning future climate in India. It will result in a shorter winter tourism season in the northern states where the cold weather enables winter sports activities such as skiing and snowboarding. Coastal tourism along India's stretched coastline may become less attractive to tourists due to damage and disruption to coral reefs and marine wildlife. Sea-level rise and coastal erosion may push beach tourists to more desirable and scenic destinations. India's transport infrastructure is key to enabling the safe and efficient movement of tourists around the country. The current weather is already impacting the air, road and rail networks and, further challenges are highly likely due to a changing climate. There is still an opportunity for India's tourism industry to adapt through physical and policy developments. It would make India a more competitive and sustainable tourism destination.

Drawing on sociolinguistics, this chapter proposes an encoding–decoding perspective on evaluation, conceptualizing codes as interpretive schemas that are encoded by firms and decoded by audiences. A key element in this process is code complexity, denoting combinations of interdependent elements. We demonstrate that the evaluation of code complexity depends on the type of audience (professionals and laypersons) and the type of complexity (technological and aesthetic). We analyze the attribution of awards by professionals and the public in luxury watchmaking, featuring three mechanisms: the social embeddedness of audiences, their motivation for evaluation and supply-and-demand matching. The results attest to significant differences in the evaluation of technological and aesthetic code complexity by professionals and laypersons. There is a premium attributed to aesthetic code complexity by professionals and a premium attributed to technological complexity by laypersons. Finding the right type and level of code complexity to pursue in their offerings is a key strategic challenge for producers.

A mathematical model for sustainable optimization is presented. The sustainability parameters are linked to end-of-life considerations in product design and development. The sustainability considerations such as total embodied energy, eco-materials selection, CO₂ emission, cost savings due to recycling and reuse including the water savings are presented for helical compression springs used in mattresses.

Due to the more pressing need, the majority of material in this book has dealt with mitigation; interventions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (IPCC, 2001) away from a scenario of ‘business as usual’. An early academic review on climate change mitigation and transport appeared in 2007 (Chapman, 2007), a year before the United Kingdom committed itself to the highly ambitious Climate Change Act 2008. The final act sought an ambitious 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Although criticised in this book as being unrealistic, this is the level of intervention required if ‘dangerous’ climate change is to be avoided (defined as greater than 2°C rise in global temperatures). As Chapter 8 (a policy perspective) explains, such targets, however unrealistic, are informed by considerable input from expert opinion (e.g. Delphi studies) and require a detailed knowledge of current emissions as well as accurate predictions/scenarios of future emissions. For this reason, scenarios and the control of uncertainty were discussed in Chapter 2 towards the start of this book. Indeed, the commonly quoted ‘business as usual’ scenario is in itself too simplistic and highly improbable, not only due to mitigation measures imposed by governments, but also because of the future scarcity of oil which will force change in the medium term regardless. Backcasting is the key tool used to model the continuum of socio-economic scenarios which exist between ‘business as usual’ and the equally unlikely case of all targets being met. However, the science is inherently difficult and the end result is a wide range of permutations and storylines, largely dependent on mitigation. Early progress towards the 80% target has not been promising, but the decarbonisation of the transport sector is still seen as key in meeting the demands of the Climate Change Act 2008. There is a need to tackle the three primary culprits of greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector: aviation, freight and car ownership (Chapman, 2007). This book has examined in detail how this could be achieved in all these sectors using a range of aspects relating to technological and behavioural change.

Climate change is recognised as one of the greatest challenges that contemporary global society faces. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fourth Assessment Report (2007) states that it is ‘very likely’ that anthropogenic global warming will result in a temperature rise of between 1.8°C and 4°C by the end of the 21st century. Temperatures at the upper end of this range are considered ‘dangerous’, and the international community is focused on attempting to limit the increase to within 2°C (Meinshausen et al., 2009). Increasing global temperatures are just one consequence. The world will face an increasing level of unpredictable and extreme weather patterns, each with different, but in many cases, serious consequences for life on earth (IPCC, 2007).