Measuring Impact of Climate Events on Infrastructure Resilience

The term resilience has been applied to many different sectors to describe behaviour of both physical and societal systems. Many definitions of resilience have been presented in the literature, but the definition used most often describes the capacity of a system to maintain a level of service or performance before, during and after a hazardous event. Since it encompasses performance before, during and after an event, resilience is quite a complex area with many variable factors requiring significant levels of detail to perform a complete resilience assessment. More often than not, this level of detail and accompanying data
required is not available to infrastructure owners and managers.
To overcome this challenge of data requirements, a more simplified means of quantifying the impact of a climate event on road infrastructure resilience has been developed, namely a Resilience Impact Score. This enables a comparison of climate events and their anticipated impact on the infrastructure without the need for detailed asset data. The user can estimate the impact of different climate events on system performance prior to the event, during the event, and throughout the recovery period, or estimate the impact of one event on different assets in order to help prioritise where funds may be best allocated. The scale of the damage to the asset (object, connection and/or network) is also considered in the computation of the Resilience Impact Score. Estimates of event duration or recovery time may be made based on knowledge or records of past events.