Breaking Down Silos: Trends in Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure Planning

Infrastructure faces a growing range of vulnerabilities as climate-change threats become more severe and global resources are increasingly constrained. Mirroring a typical pattern in addressing large-scale performance gaps within complex organizational structures, infrastructure owners have sought to identify, or create, tools and resources to pilot test solutions. Leveraging infrastructure rating systems has helped users understand the depth and breadth of what defines sustainability and resilience, identify the broad range of players, and highlight performance gaps. Following a successful pilot test, many organizations seek to standardize an approach across all projects and programs, developing sustainable design guidelines, often using the guidance and metrics of various rating systems. Like many organization-wide initiatives, identifying problems and growth areas for infrastructure is clear but owners cannot always fund the significant capital needed to implement the changes. However, as with many emerging technologies, as understanding of the fundamentals increases across an organization, so does the understanding of the interconnectedness of sustainability and resilience with existing resources and initiatives. This paper explores the benefits of these connections, and how they lead practitioners to logically tie sustainability and resilience initiatives with well-established principles and tools, like those provided by the asset management and information management disciplines. Equipped with a holistic approach that balances the needs of each of these spheres, an organization can set well-informed priorities and demonstrate data-verified performance in achieving these priorities to stakeholders and investors. The synthesis of these ideas can start to erode the existing financial barriers inhibiting expansion of sustainable and resilient infrastructure.