This year, the Asset Management Council’s annual government communities of practice summit focused on resilience. It’s a timely subject, given the pandemic caused by coronavirus and prevalence of natural disasters, such as the current wildfires in California or the recent bushfires in Australia.
Linking urban physical systems with human communities and understanding the ramifications of failure to infrastructure caused by natural disasters and global pandemics in those communities is just one step to building resilience in public infrastructure. But all too often, organisations stumble over common obstacles that can impede building resilient infrastructure assets. Let’s take a look at three of those hurdles.
- Clashing Interests
Within the government sector, the interdependent nature of infrastructure, including the intricacies of PPPs, means that in some cases, scant attention is paid to widespread decision-making regarding downtime or outages to assets. Public infrastructure managers can be guilty of an inward focus, holding an organisational gaze that concerns reducing the risk of physical damage, minimising maintenance costs, and preserving their reputation in the face of a crisis. Private infrastructure owners can be overly cautious in respect to an accountability to shareholders, and as such, measures to build resilience in existing infrastructure can be disregarded due to high costs and a lack of direct benefit to the business itself.
- Resistance to share information
Access to publicly available information regarding infrastructure is restricted. Water companies, power and energy organisations, and government departments are vulnerable as targets for acts of terrorism and as such, may hesitate to share knowledge regarding critical systems and assets. This poses a problem, again due to the interdependence of infrastructure, and the resistance to share information about frameworks regarding preparedness planning can prove detrimental.
- Lack of experience in disaster management
Despite the prevalence of natural disasters and the likelihood of a sharp spike in them due to the effects of climate change, there are few infrastructure managers with on-the-ground experience in managing disasters and supporting infrastructure through it. The concept of learning through a lived experience is central to building resilience in infrastructure1.
It is clear, then, that to support resilience in infrastructure assets, these obstacles must be knocked out of the path. This can be achieved through structured data gathering, sharing information, and maintaining a collaborative approach with interdependent organisations.
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1 All information in this post sourced from: https://cedmcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Toward-Disaster-Resilient-Cities-Characterizing-Resilienceof-Infrastructure-Systems-with-Expert-Judgments.pdf