Infrastructure are sustainable when they are able to address the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Infrastructure are resilient when they are able to recover from disasters brought by natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, floodings, and droughts) and anthropogenic hazards (e.g., human errors, malevolent attacks).
Sustainability and resilience depend on each other but they also may call for conflicting actions. Because of this, it is essential to find the right balance with tradeoffs. Sustainability calls for sensible and parsimonious use of limited resources, and a minimal impact on the environment. At the same time, long-term sustainability depends on infrastructure resilience where infrastructure built today can serve communities for many years, weathering possible disruptions without the need for major reconstruction. However, infrastructure resilience often calls for significant use of scarce resources with significant environmental impact, which in turn hurts sustainability. A crucial challenge that will likely be the focus of significant research in the coming years is to find solutions that are both sustainable and resilient.
Resilience depends on both the performance of the built and modified natural environment and on the contextual characteristics of social, economic, and political institutions. Both sustainability and resiliency are impacted by the external environment, and today’s external environment is changing in ways that increase the uncertainty associated with the performance of infrastructure. Climate change, dynamic geopolitical situations and policies, fluctuating economic conditions, changing human behaviors, urban growth, and other factors lead to dynamic changes, new needs, and increasing uncertainty. Societies must learn how to deal with these changes and growing uncertainty so that societies can achieve long-term infrastructure sustainability and resilience.
Although sustainability and resilience are often associated with the built environment, infrastructure can be both physical and non-physical systems. Designers, engineers, scientists, economists, and policy- and decision-makers must learn how to address and deal with these changes, new needs, and growing uncertainties. Historical processes have been static. Dynamic processes are required. Understanding the causes and impacts of disasters through holistic, systemic, and multi-disciplinary analysis will be essential to deal with these changing external environments. Robust decision-making and dynamic planning processes are necessary to achieve reliable and sustainable services under the stresses from climate change, disasters, and other stressors.
Adaptive and integrated disaster resilience, and thus sustainability, is dependent on nations and communities designing and building resilience in a systematic and integrated manner that can adapt to changing environments. This approach must address complexities and uncertainties by designing institutional processes that function across scales and sectors to engage multiple stakeholders that promote social learning, Djalante et al. (Citation2013) and optimize sustainability and resiliency. Adaptive pathways are a sequence of actions that should be progressively implemented and depend on future dynamics Werner et al. (Citation2021). This special issue on Adaptive Pathways for Resilient Infrastructure, sponsored by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), seeks to better understand how to integrate flexibility into infrastructure planning and design under changing environmental conditions. This planning and design must depend on future states and dynamics, and adaptive pathways must identify actions or processes that can be implemented progressively for inclusive, economic, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure.
This Special Issue on Adaptive Pathways for Resilient Infrastructure sought innovative approaches to address knowledge gaps to highlight adaptive pathway solutions that foster resilience and sustainability of infrastructure systems under changing environments. The Special Issue sought literature reviews, evidence-based science and engineering, and case studies that promote adaptive pathways to target policymakers and practitioners. The ultimate objective is to implement the practices presented herein to enhance the robustness of methods and processes used to make sustainable and resilient infrastructure.
This Special Issue covers a wide range of topics associated with adaptive pathways. These topics include implementing adaptive pathways in policy, finance, and management and are intended to target the transportation, energy, power, water, wastewater, and other infrastructure sectors. Several papers address the need for adaptive pathways for physical infrastructure. For example, Buhl and Markoff identify emerging strategies for incorporating climate change into infrastructure planning and design, and Koks et al. address the impacts and needs of coastal flooding resulting from sea level rise.
Implementing adaptive pathway processes will require new approaches. Nalla et al. (2022) present a paper arguing that higher education must play a critical role in implementing adaptive pathways, and note that few higher educational systems in India teach about the complexities associated with adaptive pathways. Here is a clear gap in practices and needs. When natural and/or anthropogenic hazards occur, how can we best move forward? Clark et al. (2022) present a process of developing an equity-focused social burden metric that captures the social consequences of infrastructure service disruptions and then identify data necessary for making resilient infrastructure investments while mitigating social burdens to vulnerable populations.
Policies can lead to change. Pursiainen and Kytӧmaa, and Tuğaç address policy issues associated with adaptive pathways. Tuğaç identifies policies and practices that focus on ensuring resilience and adaptation to climate change and conclude that participatory processes that include both scientific and local knowledge are important for the development and implementation of these policies in Turkey and surrounding areas. Pursiainen and Kytӧmaa analyze the development of legislation and policies used for critical infrastructure in the European Union. The authors identify several challenges associated with these new policies. There are many other significant and impacting papers in this Special Issue. Unfortunately, with the accelerated schedule for this Special Issue, all papers were not able to be identified here. Readers are encouraged to investigate all the papers as they all provide potential processes to forward the implementation of adaptive pathways.
It is the hope of the editors, the team at Taylor & Francis, and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure that the papers herein identify key needs to ensure continued progress in innovating and implementing adaptive pathways to ensure optimal design for both physical and non-physical infrastructure systems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Trejo
David Trejo is Professor and Hal D. Pritchett Endowed Chair in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR. His research interests include sustainability and resilience of infrastructure systems, with focus on service-life analyses, innovative materials and systems for improved sustainability and resiliency, and quantifying and modeling deterioration mechanisms for improved performance and resiliency predictions.
Paolo Gardoni
Paolo Gardoni is the Alfredo H. Ang Family Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include probabilistic mechanics; reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision-making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; modeling; ethical, social and legal dimensions of risk; optimal strategies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; and engineering ethics.
References
- Djalante, R., Holley, C., Thomalla, F., & Carnegie, M. (2013). Pathways for adaptive and integrated disaster resilience. Natural Hazards, 69(3), 2105–2135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-013-0797-5
- Werner, S. E., Wise, R. M., Butler, J. R. A., Totin, E., & Vincent, K. (2021). Adaptation pathways: A review of approaches and a learning framework. Environmental Science & Policy, 116, 266–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.11.003