Why climate adaptation must lead infrastructure decisions
“Stay back, stay high, stay dry.” The Irish Coast Guard’s 2025/2026 winter warning has become more than a public safety message. Along Ireland’s east coast, it now reads like an instruction for national planning. The winter of 2025/26 exposed how accelerating climate impacts are outpacing the design tolerances of our critical infrastructure, writes Damien Keneghan, Jacobs Senior Associate Director.
This year’s data leaves little room for argument. January 2026 delivered more than double the long-term average rainfall at Dublin Airport, followed by another month of exceptional downpours. Valentia Observatory recorded rainfall every day for the first 46 days of the year, a sequence that signals systemic saturation rather than isolated weather events.
When Storm Chandra arrived, cumulative wetness amplified its effects. Wave overtopping and coastal flooding inundated the DART at Blackrock, Seapoint, and Salthill, forcing prolonged service suspensions. Inland, swollen rivers burst their banks in Enniscorthy for example, flooding homes and commercial centres, closing roads and rail lines, and placing communities under stress.
These events are not anomalies. They are signals of a new climatic pattern: heavier rainfall, higher tides, stronger storms, and accelerating coastal erosion. Nowhere is this more evident than along the east coast, where land, infrastructure, and communities are squeezed between a dynamic Irish Sea and an increasingly volatile atmosphere.
Storms, floods, and erosion
Across Dublin, Wicklow, and Wexford, the coastline is moving landward every season. Communities in Portrane, Kilcoole, Arklow, and Wicklow see the sea not only advancing, but accelerating.
The Dublin-Wicklow rail line, often referred to as ‘Brunel’s Folly’, is emblematic of this challenge. Its exposed alignment has required repeated realignments for more than a century due to cliff collapses, embankment failures, and persistent erosion. In the past decade alone, some sections have lost up to 20 metres of coastline.
Closures due to overtopping, undermining, and storm debris have shifted from occasional disruptions to persistent risks on a corridor that tens of thousands of people rely on daily.
Adaptation policy
Ireland’s policy framework is evolving in the right direction with the National Adaptation Framework and the Transport Sectoral Adaptation Plan recognising the need to build resilience, integrate climate science into design, reduce exposure, and improve preparedness across transport networks.
However, policy does not solely deliver resilience. Outcomes are determined by implementation and by how infrastructure is funded, monitored, and adapted over time. Climate impacts are accelerating faster than adaptation on the ground. The challenge Ireland now faces is not whether to adapt, but whether adaptation can be delivered at the pace, scale, and duration required.
Designing for the climate
Across Ireland, Jacobs is partnering with national infrastructure operators – including Iarnród Éireann/Irish Rail, local authorities, and the Office of Public Works (OPW) – to translate policy into engineered resilience; planning for today’s conditions and those projected for future.
- Protecting Dublin’s coastal transport corridor: Through Irish Rail’s East Coast Railway Infrastructure Protection Projects (ECRIPP), Jacobs is designing interventions to safeguard the DART and the Dublin-Wicklow rail line. ECRIPP follows adaptive planning principles that address the highest risk locations now while sequencing longer term interventions as sea levels rise.
- Strengthening Dublin’s urban coastal defences: In Dublin City, Jacobs is supporting flood protection along vulnerable waterfronts, integrating projected changes in tides, storm surge, and compound flooding. The objective is to protect critical transport, utility, commercial, and housing assets while sustaining urban life and economic activity along increasingly exposed coastal margins.
- Understanding coastal change nationwide: Working with the OPW, Jacobs has advanced predictive coastal erosion hazard mapping studies to help the OPW develop a robust national methodology that integrates geomorphology, engineering, and climate science. This work provides an evidence base, capable of informing decisions for generations.
Funding, data, and long-term adaptation
Delivering climate resilience requires a fundamental shift in how adaptation is funded. One year spending cycles are poorly suited to long-term climate risk. Resilience demands multi-year commitments that support not only capital works, but ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and future adaptation as conditions evolve.
Nature-based solutions also have a critical role to play. Beaches, dunes, wetlands, and natural buffers can work alongside green, blue, and grey infrastructure to reduce wave energy, manage flood risk, and deliver environmental benefits. However, when protecting nationally significant infrastructure – railways, strategic roads, and urban defences – a degree of certainty is essential. These assets must remain open, safe, and operational during and post extreme weather events.
Hybrid solutions that combine engineered defences with nature-based measures offer significant potential, but they must be underpinned by robust data. In Ireland, we need multi-year surveys, monitoring programmes, and post event assessments that are essential to understand how climate change is already affecting infrastructure and to validate how these blended approaches behave over time.
Climate resilience is urgent
Ireland now sits firmly on the frontline of climate change. Each winter underscores the risks: flooded rail lines, submerged roads, overtopped defences, and destabilised cliffs. The consequences extend far beyond coastal communities, affecting national mobility, economic resilience, and public safety.
Protecting what we have built will require difficult decisions, trade-offs, and, in some cases, allowing space for infrastructure to adapt, transform, or retreat. The decisions made now will determine whether Ireland’s coastal towns, transport networks, and infrastructure remain viable in the decades ahead.
