Welcome to the Global Infrastructure Resilience Survey (GIRS)

Motivation

Recent hazard assessments highlight the exposure of society’s infrastructure systems to imminent climate hazards at both the national and the global scales. These primarily physical infrastructure analyses have been made possible through rapid advances in remote sensing, asset mapping, and data availability. Particularly for the latter, data interoperability in fields like climate science, infrastructure services, and socio-economic modelling, better enable the identification of assets and populations exposed to hazards.

Yet, the impact of a hazard event on a population is a function not only of hazard exposure, but also of the infrastructure’s ability to resist the impacts of that hazard and continue to provide service to our populations—its resilience. While the location, material, or size of our infrastructure systems can be remotely captured, their resilience is largely associated with these features. Instead, resilience is influenced by an interplay of physical design factors and intangible factors like regulation, policy, and financial capacity—altogether often referred to as the enabling environment. While the physical aspects of our infrastructure systems are being increasingly well-mapped and defined, the intangible aspects of resilience and service provision remain widely unassessed as they require the experience and knowledge of experts that is highly context-specific and had previously been inaccessible at a global scale. Without an understanding of these intangible and governance aspects of infrastructure globally, it is not possible to target action to reduce all components of risk.

This research aims to collect infrastructure resilience information globally, thereby providing information on the previously inaccessible ‘resilience’ component of risk.

Value of a Resilience and Enabling Environment Survey

The purpose of the global survey is to develop a novel, geospatially distinguished, global dataset that describes hazard resilience across key infrastructure sectors. This dataset will use country-specific evidence to fill gaps in existing knowledge and global databases by describing factors like:

There are many potential applications of this data, which include, amongst others

(1) developing both sector- and nationally- specific infrastructure services’ fragilities to better inform hazard risk assessments,

(2) better understanding of key enabling environment factors which can increase resilience, which can help prioritise national resilience actions beyond built solutions.

https://www.cdri.world/blogs/where-do-we-go-from-here-the-next-step-in-upgrading-global-infrastructure-management