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Executive Summary

Resilience is a critical challenge for developing Asia, where exposure to climate and geophysical hazards is widespread. Between 2004 and 2020, disasters caused losses of over $500 billion in the region, and affected 2.1 billion people (Sirivunnabood and Alwarritzi 2020). The risk posed by natural hazards is expected to intensify in the coming decades as economies grow, urbanize, and grapple with climate change. Resilience planning, including measures taken to reduce, transfer, and manage climate and disaster risk, will be of vital importance to developing Asia as it strives to sustain economic development and reduce poverty.

Infrastructure has a central role to play in supporting resilience. Large-scale spending on infrastructure will underpin economic development. Developing Asia will require an estimated $1.7 trillion in annual capital expenditures to meet its infrastructure needs up to 2030 (ADB 2017). The way the infrastructure investments are planned, operated, and financed will fundamentally shape resilience in the region. There are three key reasons for this. First, the infrastructure assets are likely to be exposed to hazards; choices made about their location and design will therefore determine whether and to what extent losses occur. Second, the resilience of infrastructure as a system shapes the ability of users to trade in, and gain access to, basic services in the event of a disaster: evidence from Viet Nam suggests that the knock-on economic costs from infrastructure outages can be up to twice as high as the damage to the infrastructure assets themselves (Woetzel et al. 2020). Third, infrastructure affects the geographic distribution of economic activity—and therefore the spatial profile of future development, which can take place in more or less disaster-prone locations.

This report identifies opportunities to provide resilient infrastructure across developing Asia. It draws on a survey of planners and operators, a review of the literature, and case studies on best practice, as well as two original modeling applications, to identify practical ways of improving infrastructure resilience. The work takes a holistic view of practices that affect infrastructure resilience, including risk assessment, investment appraisal, and operation and maintenance across the life cycle of an infrastructure asset, as well as overarching approaches to achieving system-wide resilience, financing, and governance objectives. Three crosscutting themes and 16 specific opportunities across these areas are identified (see Figure 2 in the PDF).

The first crosscutting theme of resilience enhancement is understanding and accounting more fully for its benefits. The importance of disaster risk is widely recognized in Asia and the Pacific, and routinely considered in infrastructure investment planning and prioritization. However, planning decisions are often based on a narrow and simplistic view of risk, leading to a focus on the assets, rather than on system or user resilience. The use of the Triple Dividend resilience framework for planning, involving an assessment of benefits for their potential not only to reduce disaster losses but also to boost economic development and lead to wider co-benefits, can steer decision makers toward opportunities that deliver greater value for money. In a study of water resilience interventions in developing countries, for example, 75% were found to promote economic development, and 89% to deliver societal co-benefits, such as gender inclusion (Mechler and Hochrainer-Stigler 2019). This report highlights opportunities to take a broader view of resilience benefits when defining resilience objectives and prioritizing infrastructure investments (see Opportunities 1 and 7).

The second crosscutting theme is improving risk information. While the global case for resilience is clear, local evidence of current and future risk is often insufficiently robust to support decisions. Where higher capital or operational costs are perceived to exceed the intangible, long-term, and uncertain benefits of infrastructure resilience to disasters, under-investment in resilience can result. More spatially granular information about risk—taking future demographic, economic, and climate scenarios into account, and expressed in decision-relevant socioeconomic terms—could thus improve decision-making. Approaches to overcoming existing barriers to risk information include the increased use and standardization of open-source data, and the application of dynamic adaptive policy pathways to account for future uncertainties (see Opportunities 4, 5, and 8).

Improving coordination between decision makers is the third crosscutting theme. Interconnections between infrastructure systems across different spatial, sectoral, economic and societal areas require a similarly interlinked approach to managing resilience. However, developing such an approach for the region is a formidable task: only around 50% of respondents to a survey done for this report ranked this among the top-three priority areas for enhanced practice. Early coordination between sectors, owners, and operators allows them to create a shared vision for resilience objectives and to build a common understanding of relevant hazards and their impact (see Opportunities 2 and 3). Investment decisions made at a cross-sectoral level can give more careful consideration to system-wide costs and benefits, including those that cross spatial and sectoral boundaries (see Opportunities 7 and 10). Finally, this decision-making process can be supported by integrated financial planning and institutional structures that incentivize resilience beyond the stakeholders’ core sectoral or regional responsibilities, as discussed in Sections 7 and 8.

Practical solutions intended to boost resilience span all areas of infrastructure provision. The opportunities identified in this report cover risk-informed investment decisions and efficient operations, underpinned by appropriate resilience objectives and financial and institutional structures. Two original case studies on the use of open-source risk information and dynamic adaptive policy pathways (see Sections 4.5 and 5.5) show how these investment decisions are reached. Accompanying examples showcase existing best practice and demonstrate “tried-and-tested” routes to success, which can be used as blueprints to drive further progress across the region.