Changing climates and extreme weather are putting infrastructure and societies under greater and greater stress. Severe storms that were previously considered once-in-a-century events are happening much more frequently - sometimes multiple times within a year or two. And our old approach to recovery, focused on getting things back to normal as rapidly as possible, cannot embed the resilience we need to withstand the more frequent and severe events we are witnessing. Standing still is not an option - because as climate impact increases, doing what we’ve always done means more damage, more suffering, more cost. We must change how we recover.
We need to build back better, but to do so, we need a holistic approach. Fundamental to this change is a shift in mindset. Too often, recovery is simply rebuilding in kind, as it was before. Not only does this tend to be faster and cheaper, it also tends to comply more easily with existing standards and practices. Together with the understandable desire of impacted communities to ‘get back to normal’ as quickly as possible, these factors combine into a powerful force pulling us towards rebuilding quickly and in kind.
But this doesn’t mitigate the impact of current or future events. Almost by definition, rebuilding to prior standards and designs bakes in the very same vulnerability exposed by catastrophic events, as well as ongoing vulnerability to long-term changes such as sea-level rise. Lasting, resilient recovery requires us to re-establish infrastructure in ways that better prepare us for future events, while maintaining the infrastructure’s social and cultural value. This demands treating the event and the recovery not as a one-off, but as continuous learning, drawing insights from past experience and our understanding of what may plausibly happen in the future to design for resilience.
However, our current standards and default ways of working are not designed for this, making it harder to develop bespoke, integrated, and optimal recovery solutions. That’s why our whole industry - and beyond - must collaborate to build truly resilient recovery, in service of thriving places with strong communities. By understanding the interconnected physical, natural, social, and cyber systems that undergird civil society, and strengthening those systems rather than infrastructure components alone, we can maximise our investments and build back better. Strategic plans can then be enriched with insights from the full complement of stakeholders, leading to truly resilient recovery programmes. But this requires confronting the complexity of working together across multiple disciplines, schemes, and institutions.
Recovery reimagined
Resilience is impossible without confronting the key issue: society is inherently complex, climate change is inherently complex, and therefore so too is recovery. So our understanding of recovery must change, from linear and straightforward to holistic and multifaceted. Recovery is not simply cleaning up debris and rebuilding roads andpipes. It’s revitalising the manifold systems undergirding social and economic life. Understanding how these are affected by disaster events is crucial to prevent equivalent damage in future.
Often overlooked or unexpected elements can contribute disproportionately to the damage - and, once identified, reveal the path to greater resilience. For example, the Colorado wildfires of 2022 were exacerbated by stormwater management systems, which acted as a conveyance for the fires. But it wasn’t the system itself - it was the dry foliage which had accumulated within them. Therefore, and perhaps surprisingly, the maintenance regimes of the stormwater management systems have a significant impact on wildfire impact. Without such learnings, few would have predicted that the maintenance of stormwater management systems could play an important part in reducing the damage wrought by wildfires. Taking the time to understand disaster events depends in part on how we conceive, scope, and approach recovery.
Building back better
Hurricane Maria wrought enormous damage to Puerto Rico. Extreme rain and saturated soils caused enormous landslides, destroying infrastructure and cutting off access for communities in the rainforest. AtkinsRéalis worked on Puerto Rico’s recovery at El Yunque, a national forest, supporting the construction of resilience to landslides while maintaining the site’s beauty. We helped adapt Puerto Rico’s attractive but outdated stormwater management infrastructure with solutions designed to embed greater resilience. Applying improved design techniques, these solutions allow transport facilities to handle larger hydraulic capacity in water flowing through, using porous rock rather than concrete so that water can move through without filling it to its breaking point. These adaptations reduce negative impact, lower risk, and allow communities to build back stronger.
Still, while there are broader lessons to be learned, there is no single or universally applicable solution. Not only is each community, region, and event unique, but also adaptations are not mutually exclusive - improving resilience in one area may unintentionally weaken another. For example, 91% of housing in Boulder, Colorado, has been built since 1990. Built to newer building codes and standards, new houses tend to be more resilient to rainfall and storms, while also being more energy-efficient - strengthening the region’s resilience. Yet local developers and decision-making authorities allowed housing to expand into undeveloped, vegetated landscapes, increasing the potential for wildland fires to impact the encroaching communities. Failure to address the threat of wildfire in the long-term plans exposed the State and its citizens to greater risk.
That’s why we need a broad, holistic view on both routine growth and post-disaster recovery, so that solving one or two aspects of resilience doesn’t blind us to ongoing vulnerabilities in a third area. Trade-offs are unavoidable - yet collaboration allows us to chart an optimal course through the myriad possibilities. Facilitating conversations between diverse stakeholders can ensure enriched decisions with the full complement of perspectives necessary to confront such a complex threat.
From surviving to thriving
For resilient, long-term recovery, bringing the right stakeholders to the table early on can make all the difference. Yet bringing stakeholders together, building mutual understanding, and defining the long-term plan takes time - and our mechanisms for funding, including disaster funding, tend towards immediate response. And without multidisciplinary collaboration, we cannot embed resilience throughout complex, holistic systems. If each stakeholder is limited to their own silo, with a limited perspective and data set, and unable to define, develop, or contribute to integrated, resilient solutions, our solutions are correspondingly limited, too.
Yet the willpower for change is there. The problem isn’t insufficient will, but the capacity to respond to the increasing intensity, frequency and cost of the events, and their subsequent impact on our built and socio-economic infrastructure and natural resources. Expediting process improvements in response to this increased frequency depends on changing our perception of ‘recovery’, from a one-off cost to an ongoing process of deepening understanding. It’s relatively easy to rebuild the road exactly as it was; it’s much harder to improve it so that it’s more resilient in the face of evolving hazards. And if it’s not resilient, it’s not true recovery. If we can rally around a shared vision of resilient recovery, if we can come together to challenge and improve standards, then we can transform not just how we rebuild our infrastructure - but our communities, too.
