Pathways to Integrate Climate Resilience to Infrastructure

Climate change affects everyone and everything around us, particularly the infrastructure we depend on daily.

The latest IPCC report cycle, the IPCC Six Assessment Report, unequivocally states that climate change is not a future threat but is happening right now. Trillions of dollars are being spent on infrastructure, from its design to construction to maintenance and upgrade, when it reaches its end of life.

The existing built environment is also a complex network of interdependent and interconnected assets. With climate change posing an immediate threat, we urgently need to embed resilience into our infrastructure.

While many excellent guidance documents, tools, and standards are designed to help different stakeholders enhance the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate change, the landscape is fragmented and confusing, limiting the impact that practitioners can achieve.

Infrastructure Pathways provides a comprehensive resource for infrastructure practitioners seeking clear, easy-to-navigate guidance on practical ways to integrate climate resilience into day-to-day practice, compiled from hundreds of leading resources and organized by lifecycle phase.

The resource is presented in an interactive website that shows the many phases of the infrastructure lifecycle and allows users to click on the specific phase that is relevant to them.

Infrastructure Pathways characterizes climate-resilient infrastructure in the following ways:

1. Infrastructure that is planned, implemented, and managed in a way that prepares for and adapts to changing climate conditions (process-oriented); and,
   
   
2. Infrastructure that can withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions to continue to provide essential services and functions (outcomes-oriented).

Still, according to Infrastructure Pathways, climate-resilient infrastructure also integrates disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, climate risk management, sustainability, and climate change mitigation in the following ways:

1. Disaster risk reduction: Delivering climate-resilient infrastructure requires the use of traditional disaster risk reduction strategies, including ‘systemic efforts to analyze and manage the causal factors of disasters, including through reduced exposure to hazards, lessened vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improved preparedness for adverse events.’
   
   
2. Climate change adaptation is the adaptation or long-term adjustment of existing or planned infrastructure assets to changing average climate conditions, making infrastructure climate resilient.
   
   
3. Climate risk management: The term climate risk management refers to integrating climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. Traditionally, risk is defined as the product of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure (note: sometimes vulnerability is defined as the product of exposure and sensitivity).
   
   
4. Sustainability: Sustainable infrastructure refers to a broad range of considerations related to the economic, financial, social, environmental, and institutional sustainability of a project over its full lifecycle.
   
   
5. Climate change mitigation: Oftentimes, climate change mitigation is included within the broad category of climate resilience. It is also often discussed as a key component of sustainable and green solutions.

While many excellent guidance documents, tools, and standards are designed to help different stakeholders enhance the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate change, the landscape is fragmented and confusing, limiting the impact that practitioners can achieve.

How to use Infrastructure Pathways

The Infrastructure Pathway organizes the infrastructure lifecycle into 9 phases: Policies & Plans, Prioritization, Feasibility & Preparation, Funding & Financing, Design, Procurement, Construction, Operation & Maintenance, and End of Life.

Each lifecycle phase includes relevant climate resilience guidance, recognizing that infrastructure practitioners tend to work in a specific phase of the infrastructure lifecycle, and the actions that must be taken in each phase are unique and require different guidance and tools for decision-making.

Using Infrastructure Pathways will also “foster more informed decision-making, improved coordination, and better collective impact from practitioners across the infrastructure lifecycle to embed climate resilience into infrastructure. It is a platform, and, in time, a community of practice, for making climate resilience part of day-to-day practice.”

Infrastructure Pathways is an initiative by the International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI), led by The Resilience Shift and in partnership with Arup. Access this excellent resource by visiting the website Infrastructure Pathways