Climate resilient infrastructure: building resilience to future uncertainties and shock

This policy brief aims to enhance understanding of the key features of planning, developing, operating, and maintaining resilient and inclusive infrastructure. This brief highlights the gaps in current approaches to infrastructure development and suggests potential pathways to bridging these gaps.

This policy brief makes the following recommendations:

• Build a comprehensive, multi-hazard understanding of risk while developing infrastructure.
• Strengthen risk governance.
• Invest in resilience
• Adopt an evidence-based, cross-sectoral approach to infrastructure development to strengthen preparedness and response and recovery mechanisms

A proactive, human-centred approach is important when planning and developing resilient infrastructure. Keeping this in view, this policy brief offers three key takeaways:

• Resilient infrastructure systems support essential public services and therefore their financing needs to be led by public investments
• Assessments of risks should include multi-hazard, compounding event and cascading impact scenarios.
• Strengthening infrastructure governance is key to supporting the achievement of the SDGs and the Sendai Framework

The development of this policy paper was led by ESCAP and was jointly written in collaboration with UNDP, UNDRR, UNEP and UNOPS, with additional contributions from UN Habitat, UN Women, UNFPA, OHCHR, ILO and FAO, as part of the Asia-Pacific Issue-Based Coalition (IBC) for Building Resilience. The IBC for Building Resilience is led by the Regional Directors from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).