This report comes from the Resilience Shift’s work to identify, assess and promote adoption of the tools and approaches that contribute to assessing and enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure, making them accessible to professionals and decision makers with a role in planning, designing, operating and maintaining critical infrastructure.
The Resilience Shift seeks to catalyse significant change by making resilience tangible, practical and relevant. If this change happens, “engineered structures and infrastructure will be not only safer (do not fail) but also better able to assure the continuity of critical functions” under both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances.
Many professionals with a role in planning, delivering and operating critical infrastructure still struggle with this deceptively simple question: What can I do differently on Monday morning if I am to build or enhance resilience of the critical infrastructure that I finance/plan/procure/design/deliver/own/ operate/maintain?
A shift of resilience from theory to mainstream practice can be achieved by empowering practitioners to make better decisions and embrace different ways of thinking and working.
To enable this, we need access to the right tools and approaches to assess and enhance resilience. It is equally important to have clarity on the key concepts, goals and value created, that matter to all users along the value chain of critical infrastructure.
We are on a journey to implementation of resilience. This report provides a greater understanding of the challenges ahead and of the support that is required to put resilience into practice through wider adoption of tools and approaches for resilience.
We would like to thank our partners who have helped us along the journey: The Schumacher Institute for bringing into our work their pioneering human factors lens to implementation of resilience, 100 Resilient Cities, Arup and Global Infrastructure Basel for convening innovative and insightful workshops, Dr Igor Linkov, Peter J Hall, Marcela Ruibal and Nancy Kete for being trusted advisors and critical friends and MMI Thornton Tomasetti for their input on developing the value-based approach. Finally, our thanks go to all the attendees to the workshops for their time and positive contributions.
Publication date: 14 May, 2019
Authors: Savina Carluccio, Áine Ní Bhreasail
