Resilient water infrastructure design brief
Format
Objective: Resilience
A 2019 report by the World Bank, entitled “Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity,” estimated that low- and middle-income countries lose $390 billion each year to disruptions of power, transportation, water, and telecommunications services caused by natural hazards (World Bank 2019). The disrupted services are typically delivered through large networks that are vulnerable to natural hazards over a large area. Improving the resilience of those networks would cost about 3 percent of their capital investment, but the avoided disruptions would save quadruple that amount. In other words, every dollar spent to improve resilience would avoid four dollars in costs owing to service disruptions. The cost reduction associated with spending on resilience is estimated to be $4.2 trillion over the useful life of new infrastructure (World Bank 2019).