Critical infrastructure resilience: understanding the landscape

Resilience has emerged as a critical agenda for the 21st century. This is in response to growing recognition of the diversity of shocks and stresses associated with environmental, economic, social, and technological pressures which is compounded by the uncertainty associated with rapid urbanisation, climate change and resource limitations.

The complexity of interdependent systems which support an increasing global population and on which the future wellbeing of society depends. The ability of critical infrastructure to accommodate both the expected and unexpected is a pre-requisite for ensuring the safety of life and property over the coming decades.

The Resilience Shift seeks to develop a robust understanding of what this means in practice, within and between key critical infrastructure sectors globally. This will require creating new knowledge, approaches, tools and capacity that will transform the way in which infrastructure is planned, designed, constructed and operated.