New DARe insights shared at ICE Resilient Transport Conference

Researchers from DARe’s community presented eight papers at the inaugural ICE Resilient Transport Conference 2026, sharing new insights into climate adaptation, infrastructure resilience, transport modelling, and decision-making to support more resilient transport systems. Nearly 200 people came together in Manchester for this two-day event, creating a valuable forum for knowledge exchange across academia, industry and government.

The DARe Hub was proud to support the inaugural ICE Resilient Transport Conference 2026 as both a sponsor and exhibitor. However, the standout feature of DARe’s involvement was the strong contribution from DARe researchers, whose work showcased the breadth and diversity of the Hub’s programme. Collectively, these contributions demonstrated how DARe is advancing understanding of transport resilience through research spanning climate adaptation, infrastructure performance, network disruption, maintenance optimisation, travel behaviour, resilience appraisal, and future transport demand. The research reflects the Hub’s interdisciplinary approach, combining engineering, environmental science, data analytics and behavioural modelling to support more informed resilience planning and decision-making across the transport sector.

For more than three years, DARe’s team has been developing new approaches for modelling, assessing, and monitoring resilience in transport, whilst developing resources to support decision-making in the transport sector. The inaugural ICE Resilient Transport Conference therefore provided a particularly timely and valuable opportunity to share a cross-section of the Hub’s work.

“The conference was incredibly timely, giving the DARe team a valuable opportunity to get our messages across. There were many DARe presentations and strong engagement at our exhibition stand – so we were able to showcase the breadth of work, knowledge and insights generated by the Hub over the last three years. It was also great to connect with our colleagues from the Department for Transport and the Arms-Length Bodies. The challenges discussed throughout the ICE conference reinforced the value of DARe’s programme, and the convening power that DARe has. This absolutely demonstrated the importance of what the team has achieved and is contributing to supporting resilient transport.” – Prof Phil Blythe, Director of DARe (Newcastle University)

The conference opened with remarks from DARe Hub Director Professor Phil Blythe, who then chaired a panel discussion exploring how transport asset owners are responding to resilience challenges and developing proactive adaptation strategies. The panel featured speakers from Network Rail (Lisa Constable, Head of Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation), National Highways (Arfa Shahid, Senior Adviser, Climate Adaptation), HS2 (Alison Walker, Climate Change Manager), the Department for Transport (Patricia Thornley, Chief Scientific Adviser), and the Transpennine Route Upgrade (Ryan Duff, Deputy Chief Engineer). The discussion highlighted the urgency of the challenges presented to transport resilience, and how all transport owners and operators need to be more agile in order to respond the current and future issues.

For DARe, the conference represented far more than an opportunity to present research findings. It provided a platform to demonstrate how the Hub’s interdisciplinary programme is generating new knowledge on transport resilience, while placing that work alongside some of the most innovative resilience research and practice being undertaken across the UK and internationally. The strong presence of DARe researchers throughout the programme reflected both the scale of the Hub’s contribution to this growing field and the importance of engaging directly with the organisations responsible for planning, operating, and maintaining resilient transport networks.

The ICE Resilient Transport Conference represents a key milestone in DARe’s dissemination programme. The discussions generated by the presentations provided valuable opportunities to test emerging ideas, gather feedback from practitioners and researchers, and identify priorities for future development, helping to ensure that the Hub’s work continues to address real-world resilience challenges facing the transport sector.

Papers from DARe’s Team:

“Design thinking for interdependent systems-based option identification in business cases for resilient infrastructure investment,” Meg Bartholomew, Queensland University of Technology
“Mapping the costs and extent of disruption on British railways following acute shocks from infrastructure failure,” Dr Peter Helm, Newcastle University
“Assessing transport-network performance under current and future flood scenarios: linking hazard-modelling and behavioural simulation,” Dr Yimeng Liu, Newcastle University
“Commuting flow prediction for an adaptable and resilient transport system: a graph neural network approach for modelling national commuting scenarios across the UK,” Dr Yu Han, University of Cambridge
“From asset to network: graph-based optimisation of interdependent maintenance decisions for transportation networks,” Dr Ning Pan, University of Cambridge
“A systematic review of resilience measurement approaches for evaluating climate adaptation interventions in critical infrastructure systems, with a focus on applicability to UK rail,” Katie Barnes, Newcastle University/Network Rail
“Development of a scalable appraisal tool for interventions to improve transport resilience,” Professor Simon Blainey, University of Birmingham, and Dr John Armstrong, University of Southampton