Abstract
Cities are setting both sustainability and resilience goals that recognize the significant pressures that cities will face over the coming decades due to increasing global populations, aging infrastructure, and hazards posed by climate change. To further help cities reach and meet this broad range of goals, the World Bank recently released the Urban Sustainability Framework in early 2018 as a framework for achieving an intelligent growth scenario, with a key recommendation of calls for the more efficient use of existing infrastructure. Albeit a prudent course, the first step in adding more stress to existing infrastructure requires a baseline cross-sector examination as to the existing daily reliability, age of assets, and other vulnerabilities regarding climate change. This examination of the inherent reliability of a city’s infrastructure systems then becomes the foundation for prioritizing projects in the capital investment planning process. However, to better integrate cross-silo priorities, new key performance indicators are required to better connect existing infrastructure vulnerabilities to a city’s carbon footprint and move towards synchronizing climate action and capital investment planning priorities to better represent intelligent growth and resource use.
Highlights
Cities are setting both sustainability and resilience goals as part of engaging in the multitude of coalitions and frameworks that recognize the significant pressures that cities will face over the coming decades due to increasing global populations, aging infrastructure, and hazards posed by climate change
The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, for example, the largest coalition of cities committed to acting on climate change, require that member cities understand both their contributions to climate-changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the localized vulnerabilities because of climate change, providing the basis to set targets to reduce emissions and build resilience
When basic services are unreliable in a city, citizens and businesses have to compensate for this unreliability by purchasing personal systems—referred to as remedial secondary infrastructure (RSI) [32]
Summary
Cities are setting both sustainability and resilience goals as part of engaging in the multitude of coalitions and frameworks that recognize the significant pressures that cities will face over the coming decades due to increasing global populations, aging infrastructure, and hazards posed by climate change. New key performance indicators (KPIs) are required to better connect existing infrastructure system vulnerabilities to a city’s carbon footprint and move towards synchronizing climate action and CIP priorities to better represent intelligent growth and resource use. New KPIs are needed that provide quantifiable means of assessing (1) reliability of infrastructure (in developing and developed nation contexts); (2) threats due to infrastructure collocation and natural hazards; and (3) the outcomes of a city’s GHG emissions inventory for integration into the CIP process. This paper first focuses on a process for prioritizing projects in the CIP and developing new KPIs that better integrate infrastructure reliability and provide common denominators with a city’s GHG inventory (Stage 1—Diagnosis). A visualization tool is discussed that integrates the results of the Diagnosis in such a way to provide an inspiration for the public, and the elected officials, to rally around (Stage 2—Vision and Priorities for Action)
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