Presidential Roundtable summary: climate resilience – what is the size of the challenge?

Background

Civil engineers are used to designing resilient infrastructure. But the nature of the challenge has shifted – climate change is increasingly producing extreme events that lie outside of typical confidence intervals.

In this context, we are increasingly witnessing infrastructure assets and systems failing as they are unable to cope with extreme heat, cold, wind, rain and lack of rain.

The science and data related to these new extremes needs to drive investment in adapting the vast amount of infrastructure that already exists in the UK and globally, as well as informing the design and construction of new infrastructure systems.

However, this requires a proportionate response as investment needs to be targeted to where it will have the greatest impact.

As part of this session, participants discussed where global infrastructure investment should be focused and concluded that investing in resilience and adaptation now is essential in order to protect our vulnerable infrastructure systems.