A strong base established, now to scale up our impact  

At the end of 2019, the Resilience Shift’s Programme Board took stock of progress in the year, and considered the findings of the programme’s mid-term review.

It was agreed that our work to date has made strong progress in its aims to create a body of knowledge and build a community of interest around critical infrastructure resilience. This puts us in a great position to build our impact in the coming years and make the difference we want to see in delivering resilience of critical infrastructure. Watch our 2019 highlights video.

Board and programme leadership, pictured from left to right, Xavier Aldea-Borruel, Programme Manager, Resilience Shift; Jan Reier-Huse, LRF; Michael Bruno, University of Hawai’i, Chair; Jo da Silva, Acting Programme Director, Resilience Shift (to 1 Jan 2019); Elaine Roberts, LRF; Peter Chamley, Arup; Juliet Mian, Programme Technical Director, Resilience Shift. Ruth Boumphrey, Mahadev Ramen, not pictured.

Scaling up with new direction and new leadership

As an initiative existing to inspire and empower a community to make the world safer through resilient infrastructure, we want to have an impact at a scale that can achieve the urgent shift needed. To do this we must influence decision-makers and practitioners across the value chain for critical infrastructure systems globally.

Moving in to 2020, our focus therefore will be to deliver impact at scale, and key to this is the appointment of a new Global Executive Director.

A new direction and new leadership will focus on forging partnerships to accelerate and amplify the much-needed shift in how infrastructure is financed, designed and operated.

Reflecting on the key successes to date, an established and accessible knowledge base has been built with outputs from completed work activities available on the Resilience Shift website including:

• Resilience tools and approaches – research report and workshop summaries along with a “˜toolbox‘ that collates and maps 70 resilience tools.
• Resilience primers for industry – to date for ports, potable water, electric utilities, road, and rail.
• Policy research into the role of public policy, legislation, financial instruments and voluntary ratings standards on critical infrastructure resilience.
• Resilient water governance – the development of the City Water Resilience Approach, and associated Framework and digital governance tool OurWater. The City Water Resilience Approach has now completed its second phase and been successfully applied in the cities of Greater Miami and Cape Town. The methodology is now available for cities to explore.
• Activities to influence the water sector – working with global partners to establish an urban water resilience community of interest and supporting research papers to contribute to a common understanding of resilience for urban water systems.
• Research into global food supply chains to understand their dependency on critical infrastructure, shared in these reports.
• Education scoping study – a review of relevant further education is now shared in an infrastructure resilience education
• An activity to identify resilience “˜success stories’ has launched its first pilot case study on DFID’s Infrastructure for Climate Resilient Growth in India (ICRG) project, to be shared shortly on our website.
• The partnership with the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative has resulted in a series of learning modules now available for use and which are being tested for further dissemination.
• The partnership with the Electric Infrastructure Security Council to deliver the EARTH EX global resilience exercise in 2019 and findings that are now published in this report.

Looking forward to 2020

We are looking forward to shaping our strategic direction for 2020 and beyond, sharing this with you, and building on and out from what we have achieved to date.

Please do get in touch with us if you want to discuss ideas, opportunities or partnerships for the future.