01 / What is infrastructure resilience and why is it important?

Even as the UK races to reduce carbon emissions, we must prepare for the inevitable consequences of climate change. Updated scenarios forecast more extreme impacts, even as the net zero consensus breaks down. Infrastructure needs to be designed and operated with resilience in mind, anticipating, responding to and recovering from an increasing range of risk events.

The UK’s state of readiness is increasingly in focus. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recently highlighted updated resilience requirements, in October 2025. When preparing a 2026 update to its Well Adapted Britain initiative, the CCC assumes that a 2ºC threshold will be breached by 2050. The implications are for a significant increase in the intensity of climate change events, with a corresponding impact on the resilience of existing and planned infrastructure.

The CCC’s latest submission highlights the prospect that extraordinary weather events will become ordinary and that, in the words of the UK Green Building Council, existing infrastructure has been designed for a world that no longer exists. The impacts could be profound, for example by changing patterns of electricity usage into a double annual peak due to air-conditioning use during hotter summers. Such a change would affect energy consumption and the timing of repair and maintenance cycles, as well as putting infrastructure under physical strain.

Read more…