Key Concepts

Climate-Resilient Infrastructure

What is climate-resilient infrastructure?

Infrastructure Pathways characterises climate-resilient infrastructure in the following way ^[1]:

The climate resilience OF infrastructure, including:^[2]

• Infrastructure that is planned, implemented and managed in a way that prepares for and adapts to changing climate conditions (process-oriented).
• Infrastructure that can withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions to continue to provide essential services and functions (outcomes-oriented)

The climate resilience THROUGH infrastructure (i.e. co-benefits), including:

• Infrastructure that maximises social benefits, enhances equity and minimises negative social consequences to support broader societal resilience to climate change, particularly for those who are most vulnerable and will suffer the greatest impacts of climate change (outcomes-oriented)
• Infrastructure that minimises negative environmental impacts and contributions to climate change (outcomes-oriented)
• Infrastructure that protects and leverages natural ecosystems (process- and outcomes-oriented)

Figure 1 below^[3] is a helpful way to visualise the multi-dimensional qualities of climate-resilient infrastructure, with consideration of the resilience of individual assets, services provided and infrastructure users.

Climate-resilient infrastructure integrates aspects of disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, climate risk management, sustainability and climate change mitigation in the following ways:

• Disaster risk reduction: Delivering climate-resilient infrastructure requires use of traditional disaster risk reduction strategies including ‘systemic efforts to analyse and manage the causal factors of disasters, including through reduced exposure to hazards, lessened vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improved preparedness for adverse events’^[4]; however, climate change introduces more complex dynamics and uncertainty to addressing geophysical risks. Strategies for reducing risk include avoidance (removing exposure to a hazard), mitigation (reducing the severity of the hazard imposed on infrastructure), and adaptation (reducing the vulnerability of the infrastructure to the hazard).
• Climate change adaptation: A key aspect of climate-resilient infrastructure is the adaptation or long-term adjustment of existing or planned infrastructure assets to changing average climate conditions. Climate-resilient infrastructure includes both projects to adapt traditional infrastructure systems and assets to a changing climate and those that are specifically conceived to address climate change risks, such as coastal defence systems, in order to protect people, investments and economic activity^[5]
• Climate risk management: The term climate risk management refers to the integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. Traditionally, risk is defined as the product of hazard, vulnerability and exposure (note: sometimes vulnerability is defined as the product of exposure and sensitivity). To assess climate risks, the additional concept of adaptive capacity is often introduced into the equation as a means of reducing vulnerability. Adaptive capacity is the ‘ability of systems, institutions, humans and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities or to respond to the consequences of hazards’^[6] or for infrastructure specifically, ‘the degree to which the physical elements of a system can absorb, withstand or respond to climate change impacts without incurring damage’^[7]

Climate risk = (Climate hazard x Vulnerability) – Adaptive Capacity^[8]

• Sustainability: Sustainable infrastructure refers to a broad range of considerations related to the economic and financial, social, environmental and institutional sustainability of a project over its full lifecycle^[9]. Climate-resilient infrastructure relates to sustainability in that infrastructure that can reliably and efficiently withstand expected and unexpected climate shocks and stresses over its useful life with minimal damage and without failure will be inherently sustainable. Furthermore, the co-benefits that climate-resilient infrastructure aims to achieve broadly contribute to social, environmental and other sustainability objectives. When approached holistically in infrastructure development, climate-resilience and sustainability are intrinsically compatible because they both aim to identify optimal solutions that provide maximum benefit across a range of systemic considerations. They may appear at odds in specific situations in which a decision to enhance the physical robustness or redundancy of an asset, for example, leads to greater material use; however, a holistic approach taken from either a sustainability or climate-resilience perspective should lead to comparable solutions.
• Climate change mitigation: Oftentimes climate change mitigation is included within the broad category of climate resilience. It is also often discussed as a key component of sustainable and green solutions. Climate-resilient infrastructure, while focused on climate adaptation, must also aim as a key objective to minimise its environmental impacts, including carbon emissions and its contribution to climate change.

Climate hazards and risks

Climate-resilient infrastructure must be resilient toward all types of climate and non-climate risks, including both chronic stresses and extreme shocks. A multi-hazard perspective to addressing risk is an essential component to a systemic, resilience-based approach. Infrastructure Pathways focuses specifically on climate hazards, which are particularly challenging due to their dynamic nature, the level of uncertainty associated with them over time, and the complex system in which they operate. However, the guidance provided in Infrastructure Pathways is applicable in some cases to non-climate hazards such as earthquakes and non-climate risks such as global pandemics.

Climate hazards include the following, each of which can manifest as a chronic stress or extreme shock on infrastructure and human systems depending upon its magnitude and frequency, the probability of which will change over time. For this reason, it is essential to consider both current hazards and future hazards anticipated over the operational life of infrastructure.

• Temperature: heat and cold
• Water: drought and flooding (coastal, riverine, urban)
• Extreme events: wildfires, windstorms, snowstorms, landslides and coastal erosion

Trends towards more extreme stresses (e.g. hotter temperatures), more extreme fluctuations of stresses (e.g. greater variation in rainfall between wet and dry seasons), more extreme magnitudes of shocks (e.g. more extreme hurricane events) and more frequent shocks (e.g. more frequent hurricane events) must also be assessed.

In addition to minimising the direct impacts of climate hazards, climate-resilient infrastructure must also be responsive to the indirect impacts of climate change such as transition risks, supply chain disruptions and other cascading effects, workforce and lifestyle changes, and climate change-induced population movements.

Embedding resilience thinking across the lifecycle

Developing climate-resilient infrastructure requires resilience thinking and resilience-building decisions and actions by practitioners across the infrastructure lifecycle. At each stage, there are opportunities to enhance the resilience value of an infrastructure project and to ensure that the resilience value that was built into the project in earlier stages is retained. There is also a risk at each stage of eroding resilience value when resilience considerations are not communicated or actions across different phases are not coordinated.

What is Resilience Value?

Infrastructure Pathways promotes a value-driven approach throughout the infrastructure lifecycle, emphasising the need to understand and articulate the value that resilience brings at each stage—from planning and design to operation and maintenance. By aligning resilience efforts with stakeholders’ priorities, such as cost savings, service continuity, and risk reduction, the adoption of resilient practices becomes more compelling and achievable.

Resilience and System Thinking

Infrastructure operates within socio-ecological systems, complex adaptive systems comprised of a network of components interacting in dynamic and often unpredictable ways when faced with disturbances such as the impacts of climate change. The resilience of a complex adaptive system can be characterised by two components: 1) robustness to shocks and stresses and 2) the capacity to learn and adapt (adaptive capacity) and in some cases to re-organise and permanently transform^[10]. This video from the Stockholm Resilience Centre provides a clear explanation of key characteristics of resilience within a complex adaptive system. Because infrastructure operates within and influences a complex adaptive system and is similarly subjected to the dynamic impacts of climate change, it is useful to think about infrastructure resilience from this perspective. For this reason, systems thinking concepts are important to the development of climate-resilient infrastructure.

Systems thinking as applied to infrastructure includes the consideration of dependencies and interdependencies across different systems, spatial scales, and time scales. Understanding these complex interactions supports both the climate resilience of infrastructure and the climate resilience that can be achieved through infrastructure.

• The built environment system interacts with social and ecological systems, through which critical functions and services are delivered. Social systems include not only the end users of infrastructure services and those otherwise impacted by it, but also the practitioners who deliver and operate infrastructure and those who govern and regulate it (see practitioner groups’ definitions here).
• Within the built environment system itself, relationships and interdependencies across different types of infrastructure systems and sectors must be considered. Within and across these distinct infrastructure systems, all spatial scales need to be evaluated, from a single asset and its siting to a network of interconnected assets across a region.
• Different time scales must then be applied over these system and spatial scale considerations. Attention to time scale is a particularly important component of systems thinking with respect to climate change as current conditions are no longer a predictor of future conditions. Timescale considerations also include the phases of infrastructure planning, delivery and operation, ensuring that decisions made in one phase of the infrastructure lifecycle are coordinated with those made in other phases .

While it is not possible to reduce resilience thinking to a checklist, it is helpful to understand key qualities that comprise resilient systems and to aim to introduce these qualities in both the process of climate-resilient infrastructure development and/or in the outcomes it aims to achieve. These qualities include reflectiveness, resourcefulness, robustness, redundancy, flexibility, inclusiveness and integration and are defined in this document.