Infrastructure Resilience Overview

Infrastructure resilience is a concept which looks at, you guessed it, the resilience of infrastructure.

What is infrastructure resilience? It's the ability of infrastructure to deal with disaster either by mitigating hazards or by being able to return to operational capacity post disaster [1][2][3][4][5][6].

The concept of resilience seeks to develop stability and adaptability in the face of disaster [7]. Infrastructure resilience can also be related to terrorist or crime related activity [11].

So why is this important? Well with our changing climate, our infrastructure systems designed in the past often did not take into account these changes and so the systems we have today, which support millions of people, are not very adaptable (for example much of the UK's drainage system was designed and built in the Victorian era!). It is essential that our infrastructure systems are adaptable so that they can withstand these changes to ensure survivability [8].

As the infrastructure sectors grew in complexity they became more intertwined leading to high dependency on one another (they became tightly coupled). So let’s say the change in climate causes power outages in a non-resilient system - these outages would then cause issues with the water distribution sector (among other sectors) in a dependent infrastructure system.

A resilient energy sector would have a backup to the main energy infrastructure which would result in the power not going out no matter the cause. Therefore it is important for infrastructure sectors and infrastructure systems to transition from tight coupling to loose coupling as tight coupling increases the risk of damage propagation [9].

Some attempts have been made to breakdown the constituents of resilience. Climate, economic, social and urban resilience have been recognised to be some of the integral factors that are conducive to an overall resilient environment [10].

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References:

[1] Campanella, T. J. (2006) ‘Urban resilience and the recovery of new orleans’, Journal of the American Planning Association. doi: 10.1080/01944360608976734

[2] Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006) Resilience thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, Coral Reefs. doi: 10.2174/1874282300802010217;

[3] Boyd, E. et al. (2008) ‘Resilience and “Climatizing” development: Examples and policy implications’, Development. doi: 10.1057/dev.2008.32

[4] Leichenko, R. (2011) ‘Climate change and urban resilience’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. doi: 10.1016/j.cosust.2010.12.014.

[5] Ouyang, M., Dueñas-Osorio, L. and Min, X. (2012) ‘A three-stage resilience analysis framework for urban infrastructure systems’, Structural Safety. doi: 10.1016/j.strusafe.2011.12.004.

[6] Pelling, M. (2012) The vulnerability of cities: Natural disasters and social resilience, The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience. doi: 10.4324/9781849773379.

[7] Berkes, F., Colding, J. and Folke, C. (2003) ‘Navigating social-ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and ...’, Building. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2004.01.010.

[8] Eastman, C. and Penz, A. (1974) ‘Decision making in adaptive environments’, Environment and Planning A, 6(2), pp. 131–148. Available at: http://www.environmentandplanning.com/epa/fulltext/a06/a060131.pdf

[9] Perrow, C. (1985) ‘Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies.’, Academy of Management Review. doi: 10.5465/AMR.1985.4278477.

[10] Timashev, S. A. (2017) ‘Resilient Urban Infrastructures - Basics of Smart Sustainable Cities’, IOP ConferenceSeries: Materials Science and Engineering, 262(1). doi: 10.1088/1757-899X/262/1/012197.

[11] Cox, J. (2016) Ransomware Targets UK Hospitals, But NHS Won’t Pay Up, Vice. Available at: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjxj5/ransomware-targets-uk-hospitals-but-nhs-wont-pay-up