4.16 The cost to society of disruption, damage and destruction of infrastructure can be significant. Building security and resilience into new and existing infrastructure to withstand, respond to and speedily recover from major incidents is an important part of the Government's infrastructure strategy. This can help prevent additional requirements, costs and delay.
4.17 The Government's National Security Strategy considered these issues and concluded that infrastructure in the UK could, in a twenty year timescale, face risks of disruption from an increasing range of sources including malicious attack, major accidents or natural hazards. In the face of these risks, the increasingly networked nature both of society and the infrastructure that supports it creates new vulnerabilities.
4.18 In response to these challenges, the Government has established programmes which seek to increase the resilience of infrastructure from all types of risks and which try to anticipate future trends. The Cabinet Office has recently produced a guide to improving the resilience of critical infrastructure and essential services to natural hazards, for use by Government departments, regulators, industry and emergency planners. This will be followed by work by lead Government departments to create, to the extent feasible, all-risks sector resilience plans for major infrastructure sectors and other areas where the consequences of disruption are likely to be increasingly severe. There is also a programme of work under CONTEST, the UK's counter-terrorism strategy, which seeks to improve the level of protection of infrastructure. In support of this the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure provides integrated security advice (combining information, personnel and physical) to organisations which make up the national infrastructure. The Government will develop a single framework for the security and resilience of national infrastructure which will bring these programmes together.
4.19 Climate change also represents a major challenge to infrastructure. Higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events are expected over the next 50 years. Transport, water, energy and communications infrastructure are all likely to be affected and the case for ensuring that infrastructure is adapted to climate change is compelling, as disruption can impact on supply, access to resources, operations and patterns of demand. To strengthen the evidence base, the Government will be publishing the first UK Climate Change Risk Assessment in January 2012 highlighting the priority risks and opportunities from climate change.
4.20 To respond to these challenges, it is important that new and existing infrastructure is climate resilient. In May 2011 the Government published Climate Resilient Infrastructure: Preparing for a Changing Climate, setting out its vision and policy on how infrastructure should be adapted to climate change. It makes the case for early action and identifies who should act, what the challenges to acting are, and what opportunities are available. This will require design and engineering changes to increase climate resilience and encourage dual-use infrastructure so that, for example, structural embankments also contribute to flood risk management. The Government will run a two-year design competition in 2012 for climate resilient infrastructure which will inform the National Adaptation Programme, increase engineering skills and help position the UK as a leader on climate resilient infrastructure.