This content was originally published on The Resilience Shift website. The Resilience Shift, a 5-year programme supported by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and hosted by Arup, transitioned at the end of 2021 to become Resilience Rising. You can read more about The Resilience Shift’s journey and the transition to Resilience Rising here.
Fostering Resilience-oriented thinking in Engineering Practice is a paper published in ICE, the Institution of Civil Engineering’s journal. The paper is a result of roundtable discussions convened by Resilience Shift to discuss the resilience of critical infrastructure systems. The paper is one of a range of initiatives to help advance the application of resilience thinking in developing and managing critical infrastructure systems.
The roundtables were held in the UK (London), USA (Berkeley) and New Zealand (Christchurch) and were intended to bring together a diverse group who would not typically have an opportunity to engage with each other. Participants included asset owners, council officers, health specialists, engineering design specialists, community leaders and academics.
The discussions were wide ranging but the US roundtable, in Berkeley, focussed on ports and their supporting infrastructure systems and the discussions in Christchurch reflected on the experiences recovering from the earthquakes there in 2010 and 2011.
The findings of the paper “emphasise that multi-agency coordination and collaboration is required to advance resilience thinking in professional practice and to move beyond traditional risk-based paradigms.”
Another key conclusion is that a “lack of strategic oversight to coordinate response to resilience is a core barrier to the coordination of resilience thinking across organisations, but there is strategic and operational value in convening people from different organisations and sectors to explore infrastructure resilience.”
