Introducing infrastructure resilience

This resource focuses primarily on the way that resilience to climate and disaster risks is considered for proactive investment in new and existing infrastructure. This introduction explores a number of interfaces in which a narrow definition of resilience as robustness of a structure could conflict with, or miss opportunities to reinforce, wider resilience within infrastructure systems, and social and community resilience.

Key considerations relating to infrastructure and resilience include, among others (p. 10):

• a need to focus both on improving the resilience of infrastructure itself and on how infrastructure impacts community resilience and livelihoods;
• a need to engage both men and women, separately if needed, noting that women’s voice in decision-making is often lost / not respected unless measures are introduced to ensure that this does not happen;
• climate and disaster risks should be considered over the full lifespan, which means infrastructure must be planned as part of wider climate resilient, low carbon development strategy.