Research is needed in order to limit transport infrastructure vulnerability to climate change and other natural or human caused disruptions. The goal is to strengthen infrastructure reliability, improve its performance and increase the resilience of the whole transport system, creating a climate resilient infrastructure system.
Innovative infrastructure solutions should contribute to lowering the environmental footprint, resources and material consumption. The goal is smart, green, sustainable and climate-resilient infrastructure, planned in a way that maximises positive impact on economic growth and minimises the negative impact on the environment and, significant and lasting degradation of ecosystems and fragmentation of habitats, promoting environmentally friendly modes of transport and leading to the reduction of transport emissions.

The proposals will develop and validate new solutions to increase efficiency, inter-modality, resilience, safety and security of the transport system, for passengers and freight.
Proposals should address all of the following aspects with particular attention to inland waterways:

• Solutions for ensuring the performance of inland waterways during periods of low or high water levels.
•  Development of strategies for increasing the capacity of resilient infrastructures during disruptive events. Interconnection of infrastructure health monitoring, traffic management and emergency management systems to support informed decision making during and after these events, also supporting possible redistribution of passenger and freight flows to complementary infrastructures.
• Building on state-of-the-art solutions for surveillance and prediction of climate change effects, and identification of infrastructure points vulnerable to climate change, proposals should develop cross-modal strategies to upgrade (including physical upgrade) existing infrastructures and reduce their vulnerability, while using sustainable materials and construction techniques.
• Design of standard, modular infrastructure elements for rapid deployment after disruptive events in order to increase the capacity of the transport network or create new provisional links as a temporary measure until the transport network recovers its normal capacity. Both mode-specific and multi-modal solutions can be considered.
• Development of new governance models that enable cooperation across institutional, modal and national boundaries. Together with stakeholders and end users at various levels, develop and demonstrate innovative concepts and solutions to make operations for passenger mobility, freight transport and logistics supply chains more resilient to large-scale shocks and disruptions by enhanced planning, management and flow redistribution.