The ReCap | Resilience at Scale: A New Paradigm for Infrastructure Investments

The CSIS Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative held an event to examine the importance of U.S. government climate-resilient infrastructure investments in developing countries around the world, and best practices for applying a systems approach to infrastructure planning and design in the face of extreme weather. The event also served to launch “Resilience at Scale: A Systems Approach to Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Planning,” a report developed through an interagency process led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in support of the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience.
Infrastructure projects are often focused on specific roads, buildings, dams, ports, and other critical facilities, but such individual assets are each a part of broader networks that can face climate-change related disruptions and cascading failures. A hospital becomes inaccessible, regardless of whether it is designed to be resilient, if the access roads and bridges that lead to it are damaged by a storm. Even though U.S. agencies have been systematically screening their international development investments for climate risks in accordance with an executive order since 2014, government investments and partnerships in climate-vulnerable countries need to go further by transitioning to a systems approach to climate resilience planning.
This event was an opportunity to better understand some of the institutional, technical, and financial barriers to such a systems approach, and how U.S. government agencies, working to implement PREPARE, aim to overcome them. It also served as another window into the latest thinking about the emerging resilience economy around the world and how it relates to U.S. security and economic interests.
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Perhaps it is time to start to research an 'energyshed' theory.