Given that infrastructure underpins our economy, social interactions and prosperity, managing its vulnerability to current and emerging threats is a key factor in ensuring future economic growth.
Infrastructure resilience is the capacity of infrastructure to withstand various stresses or impacts while maintaining service levels and structural integrity. Understanding the thresholds of resilience and the attributes that determine them is vital to effective asset management and risk mitigation.
Infrastructure will need to be planned and constructed to be highly resistant to extreme weather events. Droughts, fires, cyclones, floods and rising temperatures will place considerable strain on Australia's infrastructure assets. Constructing and maintaining these assets to be resilient under extreme weather events may increase costs to service providers but will result in lower longer term costs for repair and maintenance.
Australia already experiences frequent and large natural disasters that destroy or damage essential infrastructure. Between 2000 and 2012, insured losses from natural disasters reached $16.1 billion, an average of over $1.2 billion per year.142 With the exception of drought, natural disasters can cause immediate and significant damage to infrastructure assets, lowering productivity and output. The estimated damage from the 2011 Queensland floods to public infrastructure was $5-6 billion.143 Among other impacts, damage to mines cost $2 billion in lost coal production and $9 billion in real output. This translated to an estimated half a percentage point loss of real GDP in 2011.144 Agricultural prices also increased, adding half a percentage point to inflation over the March and June quarters of 2011.
In a report for the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities, Deloitte Access Economics estimates that the annual cost of natural disasters in real terms will reach $23 billion by 2050, and advises that if funding were prioritised for pre-disaster mitigation (increasing resilience) the effect would likely reduce the future costs of post-disaster relief and recovery by 50 per cent by 2050.
Audit finding 42. The number and intensity of extreme weather events is increasingly likely to threaten certain infrastructure assets. Repairing these assets, and enhancing their resilience, will require an increase in maintenance expenditure. |
The resilience of infrastructure assets will be crucial to supporting recovery efforts from extreme weather events. Transport access, power and water are essential to emergency services in responding to the effects of extreme weather events and repairing damage to communities. Communities rely on essential services to restore activity in disaster-affected areas, so resilient infrastructure can minimise the economic impacts of extreme weather events.
Most infrastructure is intended to last for decades and is designed to withstand the weather events expected for its location. These weather expectations are based on historic climate conditions. However, increasingly intense extreme weather events are likely to exceed infrastructure design standards, reducing resilience thresholds.145
The global response to climate change is likely to see an increasing number of countries commit to reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions, following recent commitments by the EU, US and China. Targeted and sustained emissions reduction policies, including market-based and complementary measures, are likely to be implemented.
Infrastructure construction and operation accounts for a significant amount of Australia's total greenhouse gas inventory (mainly from the energy and transport sectors). Decisions that affect Australia's infrastructure, including decisions about urban development and land use, will have an impact on Australia's ability to reduce its emissions and contribute to global greenhouse gas reduction efforts. The potential of projects to reduce greenhouse gas impacts may become an important consideration in planning and designing future infrastructure.
Audit finding 43. Infrastructure operations can be disrupted by a range of hazards, including natural disasters. Ensuring infrastructure is able to continue operating through minor disruptions, and recover quickly from major disruptions, will be critical. |
_________________________________________________________________________________
142. Deloitte Access Economics (2013)
143. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2011)
144. Australian Government (2011)
145. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013)