Flexible pavements and climate are interactive. Pavements are climate sensitive infrastructure, where climate can impact their deterioration rate, subsequent maintenance, and life-cycle costs. Meanwhile, climate mitigation measures are urgently needed to reduce the environmental impacts of pavements and related transportation on the macroclimate and microclimate. Current pavement design and life cycle management practices may need to be modified to adapt to changing climates and to reduce environmental impacts. This paper reports an extensive literature search on qualitative and quantitative pavement research related to climate change in recent years. The topics cover climate stressors, sensitivity of pavement performance to climatic factors, impacts of climate change on pavement systems, and, most importantly, discussions of climate change adaptation, mitigation, and their interactions. This paper is useful for those who aim to understand or research the climate resilience of flexible pavements.

The potential risk of climate change raises interest in how it may affect the deterioration rates of flexible pavements and how pavement service lives would be altered as a consequence. Previous studies demonstrated that temperature is the most influential environmental factor for the Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design Guide. In this study, temperature factors, both the increase in average annual temperature and the seasonal variation in temperature, are examined through a sensitivity analysis. The sensitivity of the pavement performance to temperature as well as other environmental factors such as precipitation, wind speed, percent sunshine, and groundwater level is included as a comparison. This study concluded that temperature factors, both the increase in average annual temperature and the seasonal variation, are the most influential in pavement performance. Moreover, pavement service life may experience considerable reduction because of climate change in some regions if design is not adapted to the changed climate.