Session Partners: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS) 

Session Description: Managing and reducing disaster and climate risk is essential to the resilience of infrastructure systems and the essential services they provide. Accessible and comparable probabilistic multi-hazard, climate conditioned financial risk metrics are fundamental to closing the resilience gap.  These metrics can be used to make the case for the integration of disaster and climate risk management into national infrastructure policies and plans and to inform the development of design standards and norms.  They are necessary to make the economic case for resilience and to enable the economic valuation of approaches such as Nature based Solutions.  Financial risk metrics are also critical to calculate the contingent liabilities and the risk adjusted returns on investments in infrastructure projects and to calibrate risk financing schemes and mechanisms. 

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) will convene a Technical Session at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) on ‘Measuring Risk and Resilience of Global Infrastructure Systems’. The session will be a part of the Resilience Hub under the theme ‘Resilient Infrastructure including Energy and Transport’.

CDRI’s Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI) will be showcased in the Technical Session. The preliminary findings of GIRI that include credible and fully comparable probabilistic risk metrics for the transport, power and energy, telecommunications, and water sectors, as well as for social infrastructure and housing, for every country and territory in the world will be presented. The aim is to provide a greatly enhanced understanding of the risks and contingent liabilities internalized in infrastructure systems with a view to accelerating investments in resilience by governments, utility providers and financial institutions. 

To ensure the longevity of the world’s major cities in the face of climate change, resilience experts at COP26 emphasized the need for strengthened institutional and human capacities in infrastructure management for ensuring resilient infrastructure systems. CDRI’s Global Infrastructure Resilience Survey (GIRS) will bring this to light further. GIRS has been developed with the goal of finding out more about institutional and human capacities in nations around the globe across the water, energy, transport, and communication infrastructure sectors. It will collect information from infrastructure experts to understand the management features of infrastructure development, and to complement this expert understanding, the survey will secondly ask questions of non-experts with the intention of learning their experiences of infrastructure services as customers.

During the session, preliminary results of the Global Infrastructure Resilience Survey will be showcased. The outputs of the Survey will reveal what areas of institutional and human capacity are most important for the development of successful infrastructure and will create global geographic insights into where and how investments and upgrades in the enabling environment should take place.