Climate Resilience for the Built Environment: are we prepared and what challenges ahead?

Resilience to natural hazards has become an imperative for our society: indeed, building resilience in this context is not just a necessity, it’s our duty, it must be our common objective, our shared vision towards a sustainable and liveable future. Not only in the past few years, but more and more nowadays, daily situations and events occur to remind us of this pressing need, representing a call for action to act now, timely, efficiently, effectively.

In fact, on a purely economic side, the costs associated to the recovery from disruptions caused by natural hazards are huge, are increasing, are not sustainable not only by the public side, the communities and the citizens by even from the private sector, including the banking and insurance market. Numbers, and costs, are likely to increase if projected in the future, exacerbated by climate change impacts. Thus, the adoption of a resilient approach is mandatory to minimize the damages and consequences, including the economic ones, to our infrastructures, cities, communities and society.

But what is this about?

Resilience sits in an intricate interplay among individuals, communities, institutions and infrastructures. Moreover, it is well known that Resilience depends on many factors such as technological (e.g. tools), human (e.g. capability of intervention and exploitation of information from citizens and users) and user’s acceptance (e.g. understanding the added value provided by innovations for the improvement of capabilities, in both ordinary and extraordinary conditions). Indeed, Resilience heavily depends on the degree to which individuals, communities and organizations can organize themselves to learn from past events (e.g. hazards, shocks, stresses) and act accordingly to minimize the risks and impacts of future ones.

In this context, our common goal should be to support the society (citizens, communities, institutions, etc.) in preventing, promptly detecting, timely responding to and cost effectively recovering from disruptions, such as those caused by natural hazards by increasing the resilience of the systems they use and/or operate, across their life cycle. This would be possible if we start streamlining the resilience “concept” for what it is, we stop attributing to it “capacities” or “dimensions” it should not have but we consider it for what benefit and value creation it can provide.
For instance, if we think about the built environment and an urban ecosystem, one can certainly considers three main levels of Resilience:

• Level 1 – Resilience of infrastructure assets: This is the simplest to be achieved, but also the foundation of the whole resilience approach. Assets, such as roads, power lines, water lines, etc., must withstand stressor and shocks, induced by natural hazards within a sort of a design and built principle of resilience as a core capacity they can exploit. Here, the benefit of more resilient infrastructure assets is a reduction in the life-cycle cost of assets.
• Resilience of infrastructure services: Infrastructure systems are interconnected networks, and the resilience of individual assets might be a poor proxy for the resilience of services provided at the network level. This is why a systemic approach to resilience services is preferable. At this level, the benefit of more resilient infrastructure is the provision of more reliable services.
• Resilience of infrastructure users: In the end what matters is the resilience of users. Infrastructure disruptions can be catastrophic or not, depending on whether users—including people and supply chains—can cope with them. At this level, the benefit of more resilient infrastructure is a reduction in the total impact of natural hazards on people and economies.