Investigating the Impact of Climate Change on Traffic Accidents in Jordan

Maen Qaseem Ghadi ()
Additional contact information
Maen Qaseem Ghadi: Department of Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan, Amman 11733, Jordan

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 5, 1-15

Abstract: This research studies the impact of a number of climate change features on the severity of traffic accidents in Jordan. This case study is based on monthly data collected from six meteorological stations. The relationship between climate and accident severity is delicate and hard to observe in the short term; therefore, three validation techniques were used: feature selection, correlation testing, and time series modeling. In the first two techniques, Recursive Feature Elimination with Random Forest and a correlation matrix were employed to select the features with the greatest influence on the target variable. Applying the feature selection algorithm highlighted rainfall as the feature with the greatest influence on the target variable, followed by CO 2 emissions and average temperatures. For a more precise explanation, the selected features were used as inputs for the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. Unlike conventional linear models, ARDL can handle a non-linear time series dataset, which is fit for our case study. The developed model has confirmed the positive impact of average rainfalls and mean temperatures on accident risk in the long run and CO 2 emissions in the short run. This finding highlights the importance of implementing adaptive strategies and policies to strengthen resilience against the growing effects of climate change on road safety in Jordan.

Keywords: climate change; traffic accidents; Recursive Feature Elimination; random forest; ARDL model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/5/2161/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/5/2161/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:5:p:2161-:d:1603954

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().