Building Resilient Infrastructure

In March 2016, the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities released 'Building Resilient Infrastructure'. This report reviews the decision-making process for new infrastructure and emphasises the need to embed resilience into this process and practical guidance to do so.

The report is based on findings that show critical infrastructure is highly vulnerable to, and a major casualty of, natural disasters. Repairing or replacing infrastructure after a natural disaster is often costly and difficult, and can worsen the suffering of affected communities.

The report makes three key recommendations:

1. Improve infrastructure planning processes: integrate resilience in government and industry decision-making by adopting the principles for resilience in infrastructure planning. These are:

Identify disaster risks
Apply robust methodologies for CBAs
Coordinate, centralise and make available critical data and information
Strengthen approval process
Embed ongoing monitoring of resilience

2. Improve incentives: prioritise policy changes and funding arrangements that ensure disaster resilience is considered and incorporated, where appropriate, into infrastructure planning

3. Improve capacity: government and industry should work to strengthen the technical capacity of practitioners to identify, analyse and evaluate the costs and benefits of resilience options.

Released: 2 March 2016