Materials and Technologies for Enduring, Resilient, and Sustainable Transport Infrastructure

Europe’s transport infrastructure is undergoing a critical transition towards sustainability, circularity, and climate resilience. Ageing assets, increasing climate-related hazards, and growing demands for mobility and resource efficiency require new approaches to infrastructure design, construction, and maintenance. While recent European research initiatives have delivered significant advances in low-carbon materials, digital monitoring and assessment methods, resilience-oriented decision-support tools, and nature-based solutions, major challenges remain unresolved. In particular, integrated approaches that jointly address safety, climate adaptation, decarbonisation, circularity, and biodiversity across the entire infrastructure life cycle are still lacking. Furthermore, fragmented data environments, insufficiently harmonised assessment methodologies, and the limited large-scale deployment of innovative technologies continue to hinder implementation. Achieving European climate and sustainability targets therefore requires a new generation of intelligent, resource-efficient, and resilient infrastructure solutions that combine innovative materials, digital technologies, nature-based approaches, and life-cycle-oriented decision-making within a comprehensive and integrated framework.