What are the key drivers of a change in practice to more resilient infrastructure? This question has been front of mind during May. In Melbourne, Australia, we brought together grantees for different aspects of the Resilience Shift’s work on the drivers and incentives of change, looking at it from a policy (top down) perspective as well as what we have learned from the industry specific resilience primers. It has been interesting to compare the levers used across the spectrum of policy – including legislation, public private partnerships and ratings tools – with what we see in practice within particular industries. This has surfaced genuinely inspiring examples of how best to promote resilience at different levels of influence, and at the different stages of the infrastructure lifecycle.
The Resilience Shift talked to two different leaders in the field of water resilience this month. Martin Shouler has led the team collaborating on the City Water Resilience Approach and he highlights how cities need tools and approaches to help them navigate the process of building urban water resilience. Meanwhile AGWA’s John Matthews remarks that in the area of influencing policy, “you’ve just got to keep on showing up”. His work blends technical and policy knowledge for climate adaptation and water management, for practical implementation. We asked him about AGWA’s work to influence policy, his advice for others in this field, and his thoughts on the city water resilience framework.
For those interested in studying infrastructure resilience, there are opportunities world-wide to undertake undergraduate and postgraduate education. We have shared a resource of resilience-related infrastructure education specialisations, departments and courses, based on desk research we conducted into this area. You can also track Resilience Shift activities in a map of our global footprint to date.
In June, you’ll find us at the 4TU Federation’s DeSIRE conference, the Resilient Cities Congress 2019, and the 8th REA Symposium 2019 – join us in Kalmar, Sweden at two workshop sessions that will address the challenges faced when designing and implementing tools for resilience. Using a methodology called Action Learning, these will put into practice to solve, in real time, challenges workshop members face when implementing tools or methodologies to enable resilient performance. Find out how to register.
In July we’ll also be hosting a screening and panel discussion event about Cape Town: Day Zero with Peter Willis and Victor van Aswegen, of the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative, who are creating a film library of interviews with Capetonians. This will take place during London Climate Action Week and will be an opportunity to reflect on the lessons for cities worldwide from the Cape Town water crisis of 2017/18.
Here are some of the things that we liked this month:
- The Australian Government has released a statement on the national research priorities for natural hazards emergency management and resilience.
- A team from the Hoover Institute has published ‘Seven Strategies for Climate-Resilient Infrastructure’.
- Springer has introduced a new journal called the ‘Journal of Infrastructure Preservation and Resilience’, and is offering an open access fee waiver for papers of good quality.
- The OECD has published a report on ‘Fiscal Resilience to Natural Disasters’ which looks at the lessons learnt from Countries experience in terms of financing disaster response.
- Jennifer Copic from the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies has published a short blog on what we mean when we talk about ‘emerging risks’; an important step to thinking about increasing an organisations resilience.
- Elsevier has announced the preorder of ‘Optimizing Community Infrastructure: Resilience in the face of shocks and stresses’, due for publication in October 2019.
