We are interested in the news and views of others about critical infrastructure resilience and related matters. When we find something we like or find useful, we will share it and post the link here. You can suggest links to include.
Loading...In partnership with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the World Bank has, over the past decade, emerged as a global leader in assessing exposure to hazards and addressing disaster risks. Drawing on our accumulated experience and expertise, these virtually facilitated and self-paced courses are designed to enhance your knowledge as a resilience and disaster risk management professional.
Loading...Swiss Re and the London School of Economics have developed this primer for insurance markets and economies. Developing innovative insurance resilience indices for three core areas of risk: natural catstrophe, mortality and healthcare.
[ Primer ]
Loading...A repository of useful guides, reports and best practices for improving resilience.
[ Website ]
Loading...In this paper, The business case for resilience, Arcadis explore this topic within the context of cities, industries, utilities and mobility, and ground the discussion in concrete examples of work that they have done.
The paper also examines the important topics of digital and financial resilience.
[ Report ]
Loading...The articles in this issue of ‘The Bridge’ present examples of engineering innovation to develop resilient infrastructure.
[ Journal Article ]
Loading...This paper proposes a critical infrastructure interdependency analysis framework and illustrates its application in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. This framework leverages system-level and asset-level infrastructure analyses to illustrate potential cascading and escalating failures, as well as to identify and prioritise potential resilience strategies. The Puerto Rico case study also elucidates the elements and required conditions to operationalise critical infrastructure interdependency analysis in all phases of risk and emergency management, and in the broader perspective of long-term adaptation planning and sustainable development.
[ Report ]
Loading...Considerable work has been done to understand and improve the resilience of individual infrastructure components. However, systems of components, or even systems of systems, are far less well understood. Cascade effects, where the loss of one infrastructure affects others, is a major source of vulnerability which can lead to catastrophic disruptions of essential services. Interdependencies can also lead to large-scale failures when even a single component is disrupted and results in ‘cascading’ failures within and between networks. This is particularly true for power systems, as many other lifeline infrastructure systems rely on electricity. In this study we review the literature and give a primer on the vulnerabilities of networked energy infrastructure.
Loading...This paper explores the benefits and the costs of strengthening infrastructure assets to make them more resilient, reducing the repair costs and infrastructure disruptions caused by natural hazards. Strengthening infrastructure assets in low- and middle-income countries would increase investment needs in power, transport, and water and sanitation by between $11 billion and $65 billion a year, i.e. 3 percent of baseline infrastructure investment needs. The uncertainty pertaining to the costs and benefits of infrastructure resilience makes it difficult to provide a single estimate for the benefit-cost ratio of strengthening exposed infrastructure assets. To manage this uncertainty, this paper explores the benefit-cost ratio in 3,000 scenarios, combining uncertainties in all parameters of the analysis.
[ Paper ]
Loading...From serving our most basic needs to enabling our most ambitious ventures in trade and technology, infrastructure services are essential for raising and maintaining people’s quality of life. Yet millions of people, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are facing the consequences of unreliable electricity grids, inadequate water and sanitation systems, and overstrained transport networks. Natural hazards magnify the challenges faced by these fragile systems. Building on a wide range of case studies, global empirical analyses, and modeling exercises, Lifelines lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure. Lifelines concludes by identifying five obstacles to resilient infrastructure and offering concrete recommendations and specific actions that can be taken by governments, stakeholders, and the international community to improve the quality and resilience of these essential services, and thereby contribute to more resilient and prosperous societies.
[ Book ]
Loading...On 18-19 February 2019, EPFL organised a workshop of the SmartResilience project, hosted by the Swiss Re Institute in Zurich. The workshop gathered representatives from insurance and insurance experts. After providing some general considerations about insurance, resilience and critical infrastructure (CI) to describe the context in which the methodologies developed by the SmartResilience project can be used in an insurance setting, this report provides an analysis of the contribution of SmartResilience to insurance. The analysis elaborates from research made prior to the workshop, presentations made by partners of SmartResilience, and discussion among participants.
Loading...When extreme wind gusts from the Tapani storm hit the western shore of Finland in December 2011, the resulting cascade of critical infrastructure failures throughout the country was alarming. Sixty thousand faults in the electricity grid disconnected 570,000 customers—one of every six households nationally—with consequences to the heating systems, hospitals and water distribution and wastewater treatment and an interruption of unpowered telecommunication services.
[ Blog ]
Loading...Changing complexity in the increasingly integrated human, natural, and built systems within which our infrastructures are designed and operated make it necessary to examine how the role of engineering requires new competencies for satisficing. Several long-term trends appear to be shifting our infrastructures further away from the complicated domain where optimization and efficiency were the core approaches, to the domain of complexity, where rapidly changing environments and fragmentation of goals require fundamentally new approaches.
[ Journal Article ]
Loading...This paper synthesises key literature in climate adaptation and socio-ecological resilience theory to propose a shift in paradigm for transport infrastructure design, construction and operation, towards engineered systems that can transform, evolve and internally manage vulnerability. The authors discuss the opportunity for biomimicry (innovation inspired by nature) as an enabling discipline for supporting resilient and regenerative infrastructure, introducing three potential tools and frameworks.
[ Journal Article ]
Loading...Climate Ready Clyde and Adaptation Scotland have collaborated to produce a toolkit for assessing and addressing risks in the development of built environment and infrastructure projects. Funded by Scottish Government, and launched in partnership with Adaptation Scotland as part of their broader Adaptation Capability Framework, the toolkit removes a significant number of practical barriers for organisations in Glasgow City Region and beyond to adopt systematic screening processes.
Loading...Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for maintaining an active and healthy life. Given the growing risks associated with increased demands for natural resources, social transition, political instability, trade barriers, climate change, and economic inequality, building a resilient, secure global food system is essential. This article reviews current research in this area, critically summarizes the varied efforts that are underway, and candidly questions our ability to address evolving threats to agri-food supply chains.
[ Paper ]
Loading...Growing scientific evidence suggests that risks due to failure of critical infrastructures (CIs) will increase worldwide, as the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (EWEs) induced by climate change increases. Such risks are difficult to estimate due to the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of CIs and because information sharing regarding the vulnerabilities of the different CIs is limited. This paper proposes a methodology for risk analysis of systems of interdependent CIs to EWEs.
[ Journal Article / Tool ]
Loading...The long-term goal of this research is to drive water utilities to become more resilient enterprises. A principal motivation is the need to maintain stakeholder confidence in utilities’ capacity to manage the substantive challenges they face (in the short-, mid- and long-term). In support of that overall aim, this project: (1) Helps establish a common definition for “resilient infrastructure” in the context of the water utility sector in the United States; (2) Identified existing resources, ongoing efforts, best practices, and potential partner agencies or organizations addressing infrastructure resilience in the water sector, in the United States and internationally; (3) Identified and prioritized a set of targeted research needs and objectives that, if addressed, will underpin the development of pragmatic tools and guidance for water utilities.
Loading...The resilience of a country’s business environment matters when you’re planning where to do business. Updated annually, the 2019 FM Global Resilience Index is the only tool that gives you the ability to compare risk in nearly 130 countries. This can help you evaluate regions, site business operations, select partners and make more informed strategic choices about your enterprise resilience.
Loading...Explores different approaches for operationalization of resilience across scientific disciplines and system levels. Creates a theoretical foundation for a resilience framework across scientific disciplines and system levels. Develops suggestions and inspiration for the research community and practitioners in high-risk industries. Presents chapters from leading international authors representing different research disciplines and practical fields.
[ Book ]
Loading...Although the importance of urban infrastructure resilience can be inferred, its terminology remains convoluted within the literature due to a lack of systematic review from a sustainable development planning perspective. This review paper was designed to elucidate connected research themes, scientific popularity, and conceptual boundaries of the term infrastructure resilience in an urban context.
[ Journal Article ]
Loading...Discusses a multidisciplinary framework focused on planning theory, sociological risk approach, and knowledge management. Outlines the resilience concept that is applied to the entire PPRR (prevision-prevention-response-recovery) chain. Offers an in-depth unpublished Italian case study on earthquakes and hydrogeological risks.
Loading...What is an emerging risk exactly? At present no standard definition of the term exists and, unhelpfully, the FRC has not provided one of their own to make matters clearer.
[ Blog ]
Loading...As the impacts of climate change are felt more forcefully around the globe, decision makers are asking, with increasing urgency, how they can make their communities and businesses more resilient. One obvious place to start is infrastructure. To address this, the Hoover Institution convened a yearlong collaboration with leading experts and practitioners in development banks, government agencies, universities, private firms, non-governmental organizations, and professional associations. It drew on diverse perspectives to the challenges of resilience, including physical and social science, engineering, policy, finance, and education.
[ Paper ]
Loading...In August 2018, electricity network service providers from around Australia participated in a workshop hosted by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC to consider the most significant natural hazard emergency management issues they are facing over the next ten years. This publication on Australian electricity networks summarises the outcome of the workshop and poses questions as a guide for a national research agenda and outlines priorities for knowledge gaps to be filled.
[ Report ]
Loading...This report presents the results of a study that compares country practices in the management of the financial implications of disasters on government finances for a set of OECD member and partner countries particularly exposed to natural hazards
[ Report ]
Loading...Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) provides stepwise planning guidance for water resources planners, managers, and engineers to implement robust water management as promoted by the AGWA network — particularly for water managers working in the developing world. CRIDA is specifically designed to support the implementation of effective decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty. The scope is for practitioners working on site specific problem solving, such as water shortages and drought at a specific geographical locations in developing and highly vulnerable regions of the world.
Loading...This paper proposes a framework for defining risk metrics to capture climate resilience in infrastructure assets. It first outlines the risks that infrastructure is exposed to under a future of climate change, before summarising some of the current approaches used by large investment organisations to measure the resilience of this infrastructure. Finally, the paper proposes a method to develop a framework for risk metrics that build on these approaches.
[ Report ]
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This paper recognised that an understanding of infrastructure resilience requires an understanding of the work that institutions do to produce infrastructure change. It divides the resilience work of institutions into three types: operational, regulatory, and constitutional. A proposed framework that incorporates the types of resilience work done by institutions, scales, objectives, and uncertainties is presented.
[ Journal Article ]
Loading...This book focuses on the enhancements that are needed in the design and construction of buildings and lifeline systems to support a community’s social stability, economic vitality, and environmental sustainability. It provides the basis of a new approach that will be of interest to engineers, economists, planners, and government officials.
Loading...Based on an international survey, this OECD report analyses the progressive shift of critical infrastructure policies from asset protection to system resilience. The findings are reflected in a proposed Policy Toolkit for the Governance of Critical Infrastructure Resilience, which can guide governments in taking a more coherent, preventive approach to protecting and sustaining essential services.
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