Rethinking Resilience - COP28 Edition

Resilience isn’t always called resilience.

‘Built to last.’ ‘Holistic outcomes.’ ‘Leftward shift.’ ‘Enhancing societal value.’ The popularity of these terms shows that, at last, resilience is becoming woven into our working culture. Across major projects, bolstering the underlying health, security, prosperity, or social wellbeing of a community is becoming increasingly important. And, with climate-related disasters rising by nearly 35% since the 1990s, affecting over 4 billion people worldwide, the imperative of addressing our resilience challenges is timely, to say the least.

Now, at COP28, we’re being challenged to do much more than simply demonstrate traditional physical hardening or cyber resilience in our projects. We’re being challenged to rethink how we conceive of resilience itself.

Resilience is more than a quality we build into our infrastructure. Nor is it just an additional layer of robustness or redundancy to protect us from threats. Resilience is a fundamental aspect of human communities and the natural, physical, cyber, and social systems that underpin them. And identifying, strengthening, and maintaining resilience – including addressing systemic inequities that leave populations at risk – depends on nothing less than a systematic understanding of society itself.

End-to-end, multidisciplinary, cross-lifecycle, and outcomes-driven, through and through. In this magazine, you’ll find features from the forefront of resilience, showing the direct impact that an integrated, systems-thinking approach can have throughout the project lifecycle. From decarbonisation to disaster recovery, wildfires to hurricanes and droughts, AtkinsRéalis is working to embed resilience more deeply at every stage of the lifecycle, from ‘Anticipate’ and ‘Avoid’ through ‘Withstand’ and ‘Recover.’

There are no shortcuts – building true resilience to climate change and the range of stressors we face will take decades. And those long-term efforts will inevitably be punctuated by disasters requiring recovery – but that recovery cannot be simply a return to ‘normal’. We must build in resilience to future threats that we foresee today. By understanding the deeper fundamentals required to create resilient communities, and endeavouring to strengthen them across different systems, we have a huge opportunity.

Not only to better prepare ourselves for tomorrow’s world - but to make that world a stronger, fairer, and more sustainable one, too.

Enjoy the magazine.

Read the COP28 Edition of Rethinking Resilience magazine. Read the COP28 Edition of Rethinking Resilience magazine.

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Rethinking Resilience - COP28 Edition

Maria Honeycutt