Developing an innovative framework for enhancing the resilience of critical infrastructure to climate change

Abstract

Adaptation of our built environment and our Critical Infrastructures will be required to enhance their resilience to climate change. Resilience, as currently promoted for CIs, focuses primarily on minimisation of disruption from extreme weather events and rapid recovery to pre-disruption service levels. Anticipation, absorption through robustness and redundancy, adaptation and recovery are the key attributes in such approaches. Climate change, however, is a unique challenge in that it is characterised by various timescales (short, medium and long), predictable and unpredictable events and slow-onset and rapid-onset events. Severe climate change will also result in a climate regime that is significantly different to our current regime. This requires transformation of our CIs to ones that are flexible, modular and diverse. We propose a framework for enhancing CI resilience to climate change which will move from incremental change to transformation of our CIs. Our framework proposes three timescales (short, medium and long term) and the properties needed at each timescale to achieve the transformation required.