Value resilience in investment decisions

Investing in resilient design can minimise losses of service and reduce whole-of-life costs for infrastructure owners, users and taxpayers. It also ensures assets contribute to the systemic resilience of their locations and the communities they serve.47

To minimise costs and increase value, the value placed on resilience though the infrastructure lifecycle must be consistent. A national approach to quantifying the risks, costs, benefits and performance of resilient assets would embed the economic case into the business case for investment, along with commercial whole-of-life cost considerations.

Harmonising national and Jurisdictional business case and project assurance guidance would provide a consistent understanding of how projects support community resilience.48 This would clarify the best-value opportunities for interventions that enable adaptation or mitigation.

To support evidence-based decisions, data and common scenarios should be used to quantify the costs for the interventions needed to build community resilience. The benefits should be evaluated from a broad, systemic and whole-of-life perspective, and include those that flow to communities over time as places and systems become more resilient.

It is equally important to consistently quantify the full costs of disasters borne by communities beyond loss of life, injury and damage to infrastructure and property.

These include the impact of service disruptions on small to medium enterprises, community trauma and declining wellbeing, and damage to, or loss of, features of cultural value and natural ecosystems.49 This will assist in analysing the value of resilience investment.

The intent is to realise a nationally consistent process for valuing resilience. The new approach should include:

•  a methodology for undertaking place-based resilience assessments within business case development over infrastructure's long-term lifecycles of 50 to 100 years

•  an information campaign for all decision-makers that includes practical guidance and training materials so resilience can be consistently considered across Australia

•  high-quality data and resilience scenarios for testing interventions50

•  alignment with national and Jurisdictional business case and project assurance guidelines, including the Australian Transport Assessment and Planning Guidelines.51

Embedding these aspects will produce a standardised, Australia-wide process for valuing resilience that analyses the full value of resilience investment.