Report on Global Infrastructure Resilience

Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) has recently released a biennial report on “Global Infrastructure Resilience: Capturing the Resilience Dividend.”

Key Highlights of the Report:

• Climate change may lead to an estimated global Average Annual Loss (AAL) of between $732 and $845 billion in infrastructure sectors and buildings.
  • It represents about 14% of 2021-2022 global GDP growth.
  • Geological hazards account for 30% of total global AAL, while climatic hazards account for 70%.
• About half of this contingent liability is held by low-and middle-income countries (LMIC).
• LMICs include a wide range of economies, including:
  • Low-income developing countries
  • Emerging economies
  • Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
  • Landlocked developing nations

Effect of Climate Change:

• Climate change can significantly increase the AAL, with different consequences for high, middle, and low-income countries.
  • The risk is also not distributed evenly across sectors.
  • Roughly 80% of the risk is concentrated in the power, transportation, and telecommunications sectors.
• The global AAL from disasters and climate change in just the principal infrastructure sectors is between $301 and $330 billion. 
• $9.2 trillion must be invested to address the infrastructure deficit, achieve SustainableDevelopment Goals (SDGs), achieve Net Zero, and strengthen resilience by 2050.
  • Out of this, $2.84-2.9 trillion must be invested in LMICs.
• Climate change is expected to increase AAL by 11% in high-income countries, 12-22% in middle-income countries, and 33% in low-income countries.
• Extreme climate hazards exacerbate disaster risks, asset losses, and service disruptions.

Global Infrastructure Asset Value:

• High-income countries account for approximately 67% of global infrastructure asset value.
• Upper and lower-middle-income countries account for 24.8% and 7.0%.
• Low-income countries account for only 0.6%.
• However, LMICs have the highest relative risk, with a relative AAL ranging from 0.31 to 0.41%, compared to 0.14% in high-income countries.

Capital investment in an infrastructure asset

• Capital investment in an infrastructure asset accounts for only 15-30% of total expenditure over its design lifecycle.
• Operations and maintenance account for up to 70-85% of total expenditure.

Challenges faced by LMICs:

• Infrastructure deficit impedes social and economic development.
• Low-quality infrastructure.
• Legacy infrastructure in LMICs is insufficient to meet the challenges posed by climate change and technological progress.
• Most of these high-risk countries are located in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI):

• It has been generated for the first time ever by scientific and technical organizations.
• It is a suite of publicly available financial risk metrics for each country and territory in the world, for all major infrastructure sectors, and for most major hazards.
• It will measure resilience in major infrastructure sectors, such as power and energy, transport, telecommunications, and water, and social infrastructure such as education and health.
• Its purpose is to improve understanding and make the global landscape of infrastructure risk and resilience visible.
• It will estimate risk due to hazards such as tropical cyclones, floods, drought, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.
• It will consider the capacity of countries to manage and reduce the risks they face.
• It is built on the development of Global Risk Model (GRM).
  • GRM was developed for the United Nations and published in the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) in 2017.

Limitations of GIRI:

• It does not estimate the cost of the impact of asset loss and service disruption on productivity, employment, health, education, and poverty.
• It does not model hazards like heatwaves, wildfires, permafrost melting, sea-level rise, or risk to ecosystems, natural capital, agriculture, or food production.

Infrastructure for Sustainable Development:

• Infrastructure is the engine of economic growth and social development.
• 60% of the infrastructure needed by 2050 is yet to be built.
• Investing in infrastructure resilience is essential to drive progress across the Sustainable Development Goals.
• It is critical to the achievement of SDG 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure).
• It is also important to achieve SDG 3, SDG 4, SDG 6, SDG 7, and SDG 11.
  • SDG 3 (Good health and well-being)
  • SDG 4 (Quality education)
  • SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation)
  • SDG 7 (Affordable clean energy)
  • SDG 11 (Cities’ resilience to disasters)

Disaster Resilient Infrastructure:

• As defined by CDRI, it is the infrastructure systems and networks, the components, and assets thereof, and the services they provide.
  • It can resist and absorb disaster impacts, and maintain adequate levels of service continuity during crises.
  • It can swiftly reduce or prevent future risks.
• Resilient infrastructure is the infrastructure that can absorb, respond to, and recover from hazard events and shocks.
• Infrastructure for resilience refers to infrastructure that supports broader social and economic or systemic resilience without generating or accumulating new systemic risk.

Nature-based infrastructure solutions (NbIS):

• It refers to practices that protect and provide infrastructure, adapt to climate change, promote environmental integrity and biodiversity, and provide social well-being.
• Nature-based solutions are defined as actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use, and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, etc.
• The term ‘NbIS’ is used to refer to the application of nature-based solutions to address infrastructure requirements.
• It directly connects the natural environment with the built environment.

About Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure:

• CDRI was established in 2019 by the government of India with the support of United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) in order to promote the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks, thus ensuring sustainable development.
• It is a multi–stakeholder global partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programs, multilateral development banks, the private sector, and academic institutions.
• It seeks to rapidly expand the development and retrofit of resilient infrastructure to respond to the SDGs.

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