The importance of building Resilience in public infrastructure
Carbon emissions reduction is an endeavour that is incredibly sexy when it comes to sustainability - particularly corporate sustainability. Carbon accounting and a clear reduction target makes it easy to embed sustainability KPIs into operational objectives. Don’t get me wrong - this is a completely necessary goal as we continue to pump more carbon into our atmosphere every day. It becomes particularly urgent at the knowledge that 50% of all human emissions since 1750 has occurred in the last 30 years. The quicker we minimise our emissions, we lessen its consequences.
Although this does address the climate hazards that have already arrived and plan to later bring their bigger and uglier friends to the party. There is still another piece of the puzzle that is just as important and deserves to stand on the podium alongside emission mitigation.
And that is Resilience.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is the acceptance and preparation of the effects of climate change by building/maintaining our current systems to withstand such effects. It is adapting our current systems to withstand factors that threaten to disrupt them. Right now climate hazards stand easily as the largest looming existential threat to all of us.
Globally we are losing more than $700b of infrastructure per year from climate disasters.
This reduces the quality of life of communities and restricts access to services. Recovery could take years - where another disaster could strike before fully building back what was lost. Therefore, it is not fiscally responsible to wait for disaster and then rebuild back the same.
Resilience is becoming a more necessary consideration when building new infrastructure and assessing the existing.
The good news is Resilience is not only a necessary consideration of infrastructure management it is actually financially smart.
For every $1 spent in developing Resiliency in our public infrastructure we save $6 in disaster recovery.
All roads lead to Roma
A great example of this is in the city of Roma in Queensland, Australia. The area flooded in 2010, seeing the worst floods in 100 years. The township flooded again in 2011 and 2012. The third consecutive flooding was the worst with over 400 homes flooded. The three floods exceeded $500m of damages (or $70k per person). Insurance companies declared they would not issue new policies until flood risk mitigation action was taken.
In 2013 a 4.8km levee was approved and built costing $28m (or $4k per person). When floods came again in 2022 that caused $9.6b in damages to areas in New South Wales and Queensland the Roma levee prevented $130m in damages.
In a single flooding event, the levee already gained an ROI of 460%!
Building with resiliency in mind prevented the flooding of homes, the washing away of roads, and disconnection of essential services.
Resiliency is an economically smart application to community building and infrastructure management.
How to build Resilience
To build Resilient is to consider what climate hazards will affect our communities and how our existing and planned infrastructure will respond.
It is to also understand which infrastructure poses the largest risk by assessing its consequence and likelihood of failure. The more degraded an asset is the less likely it will withstand a disaster event. The more critical a piece of infrastructure is to the community the more devastating its failure.
How we build and maintain our infrastructure has a large determination on its Resilience - and we should make conscious choices to understand what environment will exist over the expected lifetime of our infrastructure.
If you want to know more about embedding Resilient measures into existing and future infrastructure reach out and let us collaborate in a stronger future for our communities.
