Future Cities: Building infrastructure resilience
This report by Lloyds includes for the first time three new pathways that will help city officials, businesses, communities and insurers work together to build greater city resilience. It contains analysis of each infrastructure category – energy, water supply, information communications technology and transport – and uses case studies to assess past infrastructure failures and to suggest actions that could be taken to avoid them in the future.
The case studies comprise Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks (2008) and the Bangkok Floods (2011). They include insurance learning points from each event. It also sets out nine actions the insurance industry could take to help improve city resilience. The overall conclusions in the noteworthy report from an insurance perspective:
Enhancing resilience at a city and global scale will require action at many levels to move from reacting after disaster strikes, to create a world where failure to plan in advance is unacceptable.
This study brings together a clear picture of how infrastructure resilience can be practically addressed with a set of innovative principles for planning, design, and operation. Many of the resilience principles identified in this research are already actively promoted and implemented as “best practice” by planners, designers, and asset owners and operators across the world.
Truly building resilience for all stakeholders means finding new ways to bridge silos within and between government, the private sector and communities to measure and account for the benefits of resilience (direct and indirect), and to incentivise resilience-building activities.
Lloyd’s and Arup hope this study can stimulate that discussion and, where appropriate, prompt innovation among insurers, governments and city stakeholders to help improve resilience, mitigate risk and protect infrastructure.
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