Introduction: Building Resilience in Infrastructure
This section describes three recent Ministry of Environment (MOE) initiatives, one facilitating public transit infrastructure, and two responding to environmental problems in waste management. In each case, MOE has made a concerted effort to advance the environmental agenda: to ease approvals for municipal transit projects, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and to stem the tide of hazardous electronic waste.
Will these initiatives also work towards building greater system resilience? This is a difficult call, and it may be premature to attempt the evaluation. It is, however, worth considering what might be the hallmarks of resilient infrastructure. Greater resilience would imply more willingness to diversify approaches, and less reliance on monolithic, centralized systems, for example, in the distribution of water and energy, and in the management of wastes. It would also require a greater openness to experiment and innovate, even if innovations work against efficiency in routine operations. It would also require attention to interactions between varying scales of infrastructure, and an appreciation of impacts on both very short and very long time scales.
Resilience in infrastructure is clearly relevant for disaster planning. In this context it is easy to understand the vulnerabilities of centralized, tightly interconnected systems and the value of redundancies and back-up systems to get communities through short-term emergencies of days or weeks. But resilient infrastructure is also vital to give societies options for more profound change, to allow them to evolve and adapt to new realities over decades and generations. In coming decades, will we be driving fewer cars and shorter distances? Will we find sustainable approaches for dealing with organic wastes? Will the rate of obsolescence for electronic technology and the volumes of e-waste accelerate further? The answers to these long-term questions will be dictated in part by the systems we are building today.
