RFP: Hiring an Agency for National Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment and Roadmap for the Telecommunication Sector for Bhutan

Introduction

About CDRI

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is a partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions that aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks in support of sustainable development.

Vision

CDRI seeks to rapidly expand the development and retrofit of resilient infrastructure to respond to the SDG of expanding universal access to basic services, enabling prosperity and decent work.

Mission

To support countries to upgrade their systems to ensure disaster and climate resilience of existing and future infrastructure.

Strategic Work Plan 2023-2026

CDRI's Strategic Work Plan 2023-26 describes the broad contours of its priority actions and planned initiatives in the next four years. The Strategic Work Plan sets out a clear direction for the Coalition to pursue a transformational agenda for DRI in response to a changing risk landscape and evolving on-ground realities of its members. In the next four years, the Coalition will continue to leverage the expertise of its Member Countries and partners to develop context-specific, innovative solutions for resilient infrastructure towards the achievement of national priorities and global commitments of its members.

With the Strategic Work Plan for 2023 - 2026, CDRI has set out the following strategic outcomes.

Strategic Outcome 1: A strong Coalition that has the membership, resources, and global leadership to drive global, national, regional, and local DRI action.

Strategic Outcome 2: Global DRI research, Coalition-led peer engagement, and CDRI-curated and generated knowledge promote risk-informed policy and practice.

Strategic Outcome 3: Enhanced capacities of government, private enterprises, and communities to implement post-disaster recovery and DRI action at scale.

CDRI Headquarters (Secretariat)

The CDRI Headquarter is established in New Delhi, India, to act as the Secretariat of the Coalition.

Background & Objective

In the largely networked, global world, telecommunications are a 'Lifeline Infrastructure System'. Telecommunications, along with power, transportation, and water, are the critical infrastructural systems essential for the society and economy to function. Telecommunication is equally crucial in the operation of other infrastructures such as airports, the management of power grids, and the operation of banking services.

The telecommunications sector managed to function reasonably well despite the COVID-19 pandemic, while several other sectors were deeply affected. In fact, the telecom sector played a pivotal and instrumental role in keeping societies and economies moving by providing business-critical connectivity, facilitating work-from-home arrangements, and keeping individuals, businesses, and governments connected and informed. Hence, the criticality of this infrastructure sector is even more evident and pronounced.

Telecommunications infrastructure consists of a network of interdependent systems that function to enable economic and social activity. At present, digital connectivity is primarily dependent on the technical and terrestrial infrastructure (physical layer assets), comprising of antennas, data centres, submarine cables, Base transceiver station (BTS), Mobile Switching Centre (MSC), Base Station Controller (BSC), Optical Fibre Cables (OFCs), etc. Failure, disruption, or damage to this layer impacts individuals, businesses, and governments either directly or indirectly.

During disasters, telecommunications failures occur through multiple mechanisms. These failures can be due to physical destruction or damage to the network infrastructure, such as the assets mentioned above, disruption in supporting infrastructures such as power, damage to the built environment, and network congestion.

As such, the impacts of natural hazards and climatic events on telecommunication infrastructure may have compound and cascading effects. This may include a) asset-scale impact: antennas, data centres, submarine cables, landing stations, etc.; b) network-scale impact: reduced transmission capacity, overloading of unaffected assets, localized blackouts; and c) system-scale impacts: supply chain disruptions, revenue loss to ICT dependent industries, impact on disaster recovery efforts and digital economy. Increasing intensity and frequency of disasters directly or indirectly impact the telecommunication infrastructure system highlights an urgent need to build a disaster and climate-resilient telecommunication sector for accomplishing sustainable development goals.

Lessons from CDRI's Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF) for the Indian Telecommunication sector

To assess the impacts of disasters on the telecommunication infrastructure system (first mile to last mile), evaluate the system capacity (including interconnected and interdependent system), integrate globally adopted locally applicable resilience options and a way forward to adapt with the future change, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) initiated a National and sub-National level study on the Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment of Telecom sector in India.

This report outlines the approach towards formulating the Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF) for the Indian Telecommunication sector. The framework provides guidance for different stakeholder groups (Govt./Private Telecom players) across the country to (1) monitor disaster risk and its impact on the systemic elements, (2) learn from the past events and handle them through existing and evolving good practices, (3) evaluate various resilience options best suited for local/ regional context, (4) provide its implementation arrangement and a way forward for adapting with future change to ensure seamless connectivity and uninterrupted operation for different hazard conditions. The supportive study mapped the resilience state of the Indian Telecom Sector and recommended the optimal resilience solutions to adapt to future change.

Strengthening the Resilience of the Telecommunication Sector in Bhutan

CDRI, based on the request from the Government of Bhutan, aims to support the strengthening resilience of Bhutan's telecommunication sector.

While there are relevant literature and studies on risk assessment, at present, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework on disaster risk and resilience assessment of the telecommunication sector in landlocked and mountain regions. With this background, this proposed initiative aims to build on and customise the DRRAF work in India and undertake a comprehensive risk and resilience assessment based on the Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF) developed by CDRI. The assessment will be undertaken based on the engagement at the national and subnational levels.

The assessment will also include the development of a roadmap for building the resilience of the telecommunication sector for Bhutan. This RFP focuses on the development of a disaster risk and resilience assessment framework and an actionable roadmap for disaster resilience for Telecommunications in Bhutan.

Bhutan's unique characteristics that the assessment should consider include the mountainous terrain and the respective hazard profiles, landlocked geographic location of the country, governance, and administrative structure, amongst others.

Purpose

The overarching purpose of this study is to prepare a roadmap to enhance the disaster resilience of the telecommunication sector in Bhutan. This will be initiated through a comprehensive risk and resilience assessment of the telecommunications sector.

Scope of Work (SoW)

CDRI intends to support Bhutan to utilise the DRRA framework to undertake a comprehensive risk and resilience assessment for its telecommunication sector. This requires a systems approach to understanding the dynamic of the network, interplay within the system and outside of modern telecommunication systems, and understanding of climate and disaster risks at asset, network, and systems level. With this objective, the scope of work entails:

• A Comprehensive Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment (DRRA) for the telecommunication sector, based on CDRI's DRRA framework
• Development of an actionable roadmap for the resilient telecommunication sector, Bhutan

Under the scope of this study, disasters impacting Bhutan, caused either by rapid or slow onset events, which may be geophysical, hydrological, and meteorological, should be considered. The study will serve as a guiding document for other CDRI member countries undertaking risk and resilience assessment of the telecommunications sector.

Note: The selected agency will work with CDRI on aligning the proposed assessment with the study on 'National and Subnational Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment and Roadmap for the Telecommunication Sector, India', with active support from Bhutan Telecom Limited and other relevant Bhutanese stakeholders. This is to ensure unified and synchronous outputs and outcomes are developed for the proposed assessment in line with the DRRAF study.

Potential Outcomes

The proposed assessment is a fundamental step towards understanding the risk and resilience of the telecommunication sector as well as the action plan for Bhutan, leading to future outcomes including,

• Enabling environment created for telecom sector policies, institutional capacities, processes, regulations for embedding resilience in the telecommunication infrastructure systems.
• Technical standards are upgraded, and certification mechanisms are further developed, building upon a compendium of global best practices.
• Resilience enhanced through addressing information, policy, and fiscal gaps across different levels and stakeholders of the telecommunication infrastructure sector
• Resilience is integrated into the planning and retrofitting of existing and new telecommunication infrastructure systems
• Financial policies and incentives to ensure resilience in design, construction, operation, and maintenance of telecommunication infrastructure systems are strengthened.
• Awareness, innovation and capacities of national and local stakeholders for enhancing DRI in Telecommunication sector is increased. Peer-to-peer knowledge exchange for coordinated actions on strengthening resilient telecommunication infrastructure is strengthened.

To work towards the achievement of the above-mentioned outcomes, the proposed work will be undertaken through two key tasks.

Tasks for the Proposed Assessment and Roadmap for Bhutan

The work for the proposed assessment and roadmap is divided into two key tasks and respective deliverables.

1. Task 1: Comprehensive Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment (DRRA)
2. Background

The concept of resilience brings together both climate and disaster risks. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to absorb shocks, stresses and disruptions (through reducing vulnerability, exposure, and increasing the system's coping and adaptive capacities), and continue maintaining functionality during an event and recover, and learn and adapt from adverse events.

Risk management of infrastructure systems that depend on a thorough analysis of prevalent hazards, along with exposure, vulnerabilities and coping capacity of the system tends to be inflexible and may lead to catastrophic failure when conditions change or there is a significant amount of uncertainty in the system. However, resilience thinking addresses this issue by embracing uncertainty and complexity. It is proposed that a complementary approach, embracing both risk and resilience, must be incorporated towards building the resilience of telecommunication infrastructure systems.

CDRI proposes undertaking a Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment (DRRA) for the telecommunication sector for Bhutan (see Fig.1), building on the conceptual framework elaborated by Moor et. al, and adapted by the Department for International Development, Government of UK. The assessment of Bhutan's telecom infrastructure will be based on CDRI's DRRAF study for India, it will build and gain from the learnings from the detailed assessment of the telecom infrastructure and systems across the 5 partner Indian states

Based on its experience and expertise, the agency is expected to support the adaptation and application of the DRRAF for telecom in the context of Bhutan's telecommunication sector.

See more information on the attached Request for Proposals document.