Sessional Meeting by the Infrastructure Working Party
As the threat of significant climate change gathers momentum, the resilience of all kinds of buildings and infrastructure is becoming increasingly important, both in the UK and overseas. This means that the owners of these assets, including institutional investors, need to pay more attention than in the past to the potential impacts from storms, floods, landslips and high temperatures. The meeting will discuss a paper written by four members of the Infrastructure Working Party on managing resilience that is available to read on tandfonline.com: Managing infrastructure resilience and adaptation. Among other things, the paper considers how to plan for climate change having adverse impacts at different future times, and whether or not it is worth incurring increased expenditure on new assets in order to make them more resilient. There is also a list of recommendations to improve the resilience of assets that already exist. A point of time may arrive when the risks to an infrastructure system’s performance increase to such an extent that it needs significant action to adapt it and set it off along a new path. Governments will need to think carefully about critical infrastructure and how to deal with chains of resilience, whereby a failure in one infrastructure system can have “knock on” effects on another. Infrastructure operators must ensure that the cyber systems they use to control operations are as resilient as possible. Because failures from any cause are sometimes bound to occur, despite every precaution, recovery plans will need to be robust.