We must utilize new approaches, materials, and technologies to ensure our infrastructure can withstand or quickly recover from natural or man-made hazards.
Advancements in resilience across all infrastructure sectors can be made by:
- Enabling communities, regardless of size, to develop and institute their own resilience pathway for all their infrastructure portfolios by streamlining asset management, implementing life cycle cost analysis into routine planning processes, and integrating climate change projections into long-term goal-setting and capital improvement plans.
- Incentivizing and enforcing the use of codes and standards, which can mitigate risks of major climate or manmade events such as hurricanes, fires, sea level rise, and more.
- Understanding that our infrastructure is a system of systems and encourage a dynamic, “big picture” perspective that weighs tradeoffs across infrastructure sectors while keeping resilience as the chief goal.
- Prioritizing projects that improve the safety and security of systems and communities, to ensure continued reliability and enhanced resilience.
- Improving land use planning across all levels of decision making to strike a balance between the built and natural environments while meeting community needs, now and into the future.
- Enhancing the resilience of various infrastructure sectors by including or enhancing natural or “green” infrastructure.