Public Transportation Resilience Towards Climate Change Impacts: The Case of Doha Metro Network

Since the mid of the past century, accelerated urbanization and rapid city expansion have driven the development of extensive public transportation networks to facilitate mobility throughout cities. However, these developments disregarded climate change’s threat, which gained momentum in recent decades with the unusual rate of extreme disasters. These unprecedented challenges motivated the thinking about preparing these networks and ensuring their resilience. This paper highlights the impacts of climate change on flooding hazards and the resulting damage to the Doha metro network. We applied a complex network approach to assess the resilience of the network under different scenarios. The results show no damage suffered under the base case; however, several stations and sections of the network are impacted under climate change scenarios. Thus, as the impacts of climate change are becoming more evident, it is critical to revisit development plans and precautions to reinforce or redesign critical infrastructures to avoid catastrophic events and substantial economic losses. Therefore, this study promotes the efforts to prepare cities for the impacts of climate change and support the development of resilient critical infrastructures to ensure the prosperity of its inhabitants, as in the case of Doha and the preparation for the FIFA World Cup 2022.