If infrastructure is critical to humanity living on this planet, local governments everywhere are on the front line of protecting it and making sure it’s resilient to climate impacts. Costs can be huge. But in a capital constrained world, there are alternatives. The Fifth Estate spoke to Bentley Systems’ Chris Bradshaw in the closing hours of the Year in Infrastructure Awards in Singapore early this month to find where local councils can start.
If you’re in the habit of thinking Australia is well behind the rest of the world on climate resilience, then take it from someone who is in touch with many countries around the world as they grapple with the same problem – we’re not doing too badly.
- Hear more about local government resilience in infrastructure at Nature First & Resilient Cities
Chris Bradshaw, chief sustainability and education officer for Bentley Systems, which provides digital design solutions for major infrastructure projects, says Australia is quite well placed.
“Australia is actually fairly advanced, to be honest with you; they have a government that’s that is paying attention to sustainability and to resilience,” he says.
It’s got some “beautiful” digital twins in Australia – the Port of Melbourne, Sydney Airport for instance, he says. These virtual reproductions of structures or buildings can tell authorities a lot about underlying strengths, vulnerabilities and resilience profile of their infrastructure – especially valuable at times of emergencies.
Bradshaw is speaking to us in the closing hours of the recent Year in Infrastructure Awards his company held in Singapore, which throws a light on global trends and digs deep into the technology that some of the world’s best engineers use to design their projects.
But while national governments across the board have the biggest opportunities – and deepest pockets – to build resilience, it’s smaller governments at the local level that face the biggest demands thanks to their close engagement with communities and role as first responders. Yet their resources are almost universally capital constrained.
How to fund resilience is a critical and increasingly urgent question.
“I think there’s a lot of people in government who have sort of thrown in the towel, saying, ‘Well, we can’t afford it, or this isn’t for us’”.
And that’s before anyone considers the politics of climate change, which might suggest resilience spending is not justified.
Technology is changing the equation, Bradshaw says. Tools that were out of reach of small municipalities are now affordable.
One of the things the company often sees is that US municipalities are often waiting for federal government grants to start resilience work.
“What we’ve been really trying to push hard is this idea that don’t wait for that grant,” Bradshaw says.
It’s now possible to use very low cost technology to map and plan your line of defence. There’s a lot of information and significant resources that are readily available and even free, he says.
Most infrastructure in the world is either government owned or government regulated. And the thing is that clients typically own the data. Not the engineers or private consultants.
“You can get your ducks in a row; there’s a lot of things you can do as a small municipality or a medium-sized municipality to gather data.” Such as site or sensor information.
“Most places on the planet now have access to geospatial data, satellite photometry, of their whole municipality for free,” Bradshaw says.
This means they can then start to organise that information and ask: “okay, now where’s my water networks? Where are my electric utilities? Where are my roads? Where are my trains? Where are my power plants? Where are my hospitals?”
Given access to this information, emergency services have huge opportunities to become streamlined. The way to do this is through digital tools.
Machine learning algorithms are “really good at drawing this data together and helping to create those kinds of models.
“You could say, okay, the most important thing for our community is floodplain, or landslide, or fire…whatever it might be.”
It’s true that politics can play a detrimental role in climate action – even down to whether resilience is worth pursuing.
“That’s the nature of that beast. So, a lot of what I will say about what I believe is important is education.
To assist in that education, the company has recently helped develop a guide showing municipalities how to use free, accessible information to create a roadmap to resilience for their communities.
The guide, Built to Endure, has been produced alongside Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, AECOM, the American Society of Civil Engineers and Microsoft.
It is co-authored by Rory Linehan, director of Bentley’s think tank, Infrastructure Policy Advancement, who will feature at The Fifth Estate summit Nature First & Resilient Cities on November 24.
The guide notes that an investment of $1 can generate $12 of avoided disaster damage.
“What’s happening more and more is that the certainty of damage is getting greater,” Bradshaw says.
“The probability you’re going to have that problem is going up. And in some places, it’s predictable; sea level rise is happening.
“It’s not if, it’s when.”
The Fifth Estate travelled to Singapore and attended the Year in Infrastructure Awards as a guest of Bentley Systems.
