Our work to date shows an urgent need to build the whole system resilience of ports and global supply chains to withstand multiple drivers of disruption. We are inviting industry, practitioners and policy makers to work with us to deliver on this ambition.  

Today The Resilience Shift formally launches its Resilience4Ports initiative, a multi-stakeholder,  whole system approach to enhance the resilience of global supply chains.

Resilience4Ports will bring public and private stakeholders together to define shared societal, environmental and economic outcomes, and broker action-oriented partnerships to achieve these outcomes.

Resilience4Ports takes place in the context of the multiple global drivers of change to critical infrastructure systems – water, transport, energy and communications –  that ports and supply chains face, in particular decarbonisation technology and climate change.

Ports, the complex interface between land and sea, with diverse governance arrangements and a web of interlinked parties are both vulnerable to shocks and stresses and able to capitalise on change. The disruption they are subject to ranges from:

• The urgent need to decarbonise every part of our global supply chains.
• Increasing automation and use of digital technologies which can enhance safety, efficiency and resilience, and reduce carbon emissions, but also have the potential to create new vulnerabilities.
• The physical impacts of climate change on assets, operations, cities and communities. 
• Global trade patterns, from the short-term impacts of Covid-19 to long-term geopolitical uncertainty.

Stage One of Resilience4Ports will involve a major scoping study and stakeholder engagement to define the programme actions. These will then form a framework for the resilience enhancing actions partners will take forward into Stage Two.

Only collaboration will produce system resilience 

The Resilience4Ports approach builds on our successes to date, such as the rigorous, evidence-based collaborative, multi-stakeholder methodology used to develop the City Water Resilience Approach and pilot it in several cities. Resilience Shift’s 2019 industry primer on the resilience of ports showed that there remains a lack of knowledge transfer between sectors and stakeholders.

The interdependency and interconnectedness of the global maritime trading system means only a coordinated effort from across the whole supply chain can produce impactful change.

This system complexity also mean they can act as a perfect model for what ‘good looks like’ for building resilience within other highly integrated infrastructure systems.

Ports can become a leading global example of the transition to a carbon neutral world by mid-century bringing more resilience and security to supply chains in the face of an increasingly uncertain future while protecting the health and safety of local populations.

Working with partners 

Resilience4Ports will work closely with sector experts from our two founding partners Arup and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, as well as Lloyd’s Register Group who are highly influential in the port and shipping sector. The Resilience4Ports work will also compliment the pre-existing initiatives and partnerships in port sustainability that have forms in recent years.

We know from the start, there will be no one-size-fits-all solution and that it is only through collaboration that resilience can be achieved.

For further information see the dedicated Resilience4Ports page and get in touch if you would like to learn more.