An Introduction: Resilient Infrastructure & Climate Change Mitigation
By Phil Fieldhouse
October 2020
Last month, in the article ‘We need to rethink infrastructure,’ we explored the problems, largely caused by climate change, of our legacy ‘fixed’ infrastructure designs. This month we will discuss how infrastructure can be designed with the knowledge that climate change is happening.
So, what is resilient infrastructure about?
We know that current infrastructure cannot perform for today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, society. Yet we need infrastructure to enable society to function, for example for transport, communications, resource use, defence, manufacturing, and digital services. Physical infrastructure is required to support these activities. One may wish to travel by car to go on holiday, or drink water by turning on a tap that is piped into our home and drains into a sewer. The physical assets–the motorway, pipe and sewer–support our function as a society and give us a standard of living with certain freedoms and support our existence.
These assets are physically fixed within our world at an incredibly large scale, and they are under threat. Consider the scale of the national motorway network, comprising just one aspect of transport infrastructure. . The large-scale and fixed nature of our infrastructure means that identifying problems and maintaining the assets requires a large amount of organisation, money and accurate predictive capabilities.
Climate change accelerates the existing problems faced by our infrastructure by introducing uncertainty into our ability to predict issues and making it more and more costly to effectively maintain assets.
Primarily, resilient infrastructure should aim to provide the expected services whilst withstanding the changes society is experiencing. This goes further than simply designing infrastructure to simply live with the effects of climate change.
In terms of climate, future resilient infrastructure should focus on three things:
1. Climate change mitigation – reducing the effects of climate change;
2. Climate change adaptation – living with the effects of climate change; and
3. Climate change resilience – quickly recovering from, or being unaffected by, the effects of climate change
In this month’s article, we will focus on the first point, Climate Change Mitigation.
Infrastructure and Climate Change Mitigation
To combat climate change, infrastructure should be designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) G emissions. This means designing low carbon, carbon neutral (or net zero carbon), or if possible carbon negative infrastructure. One problem with this is concrete; it was responsible for 8% of global GHG emissions in 2018. Low-carbon solutions will be challenging to devise due to the chemical reaction that allows concrete to set and give it the durable qualities we expect.
Claims are often made advertising that projects will be carbon neutral, or carbon zero, often “over the lifespan of the project”. While this is a viable goal, infrastructure often has a design life longer than the average age global life expectancy. Can we afford to wait a lifetime to achieve net zero carbon targets? The Paris Climate Agreement doesn’t think so.
To begin reducing GHG emissions from infrastructure, innovation, investment and evidence is needed to develop, test and implement novel solutions at the scale required.