September 2018 has been a great month for the Resilience Shift team, and our wider network of grantees and pioneers.
Our focus is on a shift in practice, and we know that to do this, we need to engage widely with stakeholders, from across critical infrastructure value chains. Convening those who can influence changes in practice is a two-way exchange – we can disseminate knowledge, and we can learn from the engagement about what’s needed, what works, and what doesn’t.
As we start to approach the end of our second year, disseminating the work we’re doing, and planning work for 2019 and beyond, is keeping us all very busy.
There is a wealth of knowledge captured in the latest issue of the journal Environment Systems and Decisions and we are very proud of the contribution the Resilience Shift has made to this special edition – read more in Nancy Kete’s recent blog.
Events globally during the past month have served to bring into focus once again the importance of resilient infrastructure, to create a world that is not only safer, but also better able to function after an event. Typhoons, hurricanes and most recently the deadly earthquake and tsunami in Palu, Indonesia, all illustrate the interconnected nature of infrastructure, and how communities rely on these systems, such as communication networks, in times of crisis.
This issue of cascading failures linked to power and communications infrastructure in a ‘black skies’ situation was explored at a Resilience First event in London that we attended. With a debate led by Lord Toby Harris, UK Coordinator of the Electrical Infrastructure Security Council (EIS), the event offered an insight into how the energy industry prepares for such incidents and how they aim to build resilience into the system – see Lord Toby’s article Are we ready if the lights go out?. The EIS Council was also responsible for the recent EIS Earth Ex exercise that included such a scenario among its event content.
The Resilience Shift is a global initiative. This is extremely important for our work, and reflects the increasingly globally connected world we live in. In practice, we can’t make a global shift in one simple step and have to start with geographies that we know well. Arup, as the host institution, has a ready-made global community to support this.
We are starting work in the Australasian region, assessing the contribution that policy and legislation make to ‘moving the needle’ of infrastructure resilience. This is against the background of a number of developments, including, very recently, the New South Wales government’s publication of its Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy, encouraging leaders in business and government to support communities by improving critical infrastructure resilience.
Remaining in Australia, we also found some useful insights from Australia’s infrastructure sector and how they’re managing climate resilience in the infrastructure sector in this short video.
Some other interesting resources we’ve found useful this month include:
- The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit that offers some useful advice and tools for those wanting to learn how to build resilience across a range of sectors.
- The World Bank’s report on ‘Incorporating Resilience in Infrastructure Prioritization – Application to the Road Transport Sector’ which has developed quantitative indicators capturing key aspects of resilience related to the transport sector.
- A paper in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction has considered how the Nordic model of securing vital societal functions rather than the individual infrastructures that support these functions is an important basis for infrastructure resilience strategies; read more here.
Looking forward to October, you can hear from the Resilience Shift at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE)’s Global Engineering Congress in London, and the 6th Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation (APAN) Forum in Manila, Philippines.
We’ll also be conducting the first of a series of workshops on tools and approaches focusing on the needs of participants from the beginning, middle and end of the critical infrastructure value chain. These promise to be extremely insightful in helping us to explore how we can turn theory to practice for all those working in infrastructure resilience.
Following our call for expressions of interest, we are delighted to confirm that we’ve provisionally selected four grantees to help us develop industry specific resilience primers.
We’ll be announcing their names and topics in due course, so sign up to our blog to receive our news directly.
