New whitepaper available on Urban Resilience & Infrastructure

New York — A new whitepaper, “Building Resilience: Creating Tomorrow’s Infrastructure Today,” was developed from a recent McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute roundtable of more than a dozen opinion leaders in sustainability and resilient infrastructure development. Participants represented organizations including Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, the American Society of Civil Engineers, NYU’s Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities’ initiative.

The Institute convened the group to address the need for resilient infrastructure development in a more urbanized and densely populated world that is increasingly prone to catastrophic natural disasters and weather events. The panelists’ overwhelming consensus was that rapidly growing urban centers must now begin building resilience into their infrastructure, and identified five immediate infrastructure development actions for cities to take within the next 24 months:

1. Begin leveraging new communications, technologies and social media to help educate the public — as well as business and government leaders — on the vital importance of building resilience into city infrastructure systems.

2. Create a resilience “triple bottom line.” A traditional bottom line accounts only for financial outcomes, but the so-called triple bottom line, used by sustainability-oriented developers today, also tracks social and environmental factors. Applying a resilience-oriented triple bottom line approach to building infrastructure would help to quantify the benefits of resisting failure or degradation during extreme weather and other events.

3. Encourage greater exploration of public-private partnerships (P3s). Though not suitable for all projects, P3 models could factor in the ability of infrastructure to function properly during potentially damaging events, such as floods, earthquakes, or hurricanes.

4. Encourage the infrastructure community to speak with one message. Participants agreed that, in effect, we are all members of one “resilience community,” as we all rely upon infrastructure. If all interested organizations begin speaking in unison with the message that resilience is essential to safe and prosperous cities, government officials, city planners and developers will listen.

5. Adopt an intergenerational vision for success. Despite the growing urgency that we act now on resilience, resilience development will be a long-term, multi-generational effort. 

Download the complete whitepaper at https://media.mhfi.com/documents/MHFIGI-Building-Resilience.pdf.