The emergence of new critical infrastructures. Is the COVID-19 pandemic shifting our perspective on what critical infrastructures are?

Abstract

Our modern world is highly dependent on the functioning of a complex system of interdependent infrastructures. Failure of one infrastructure can have severe and far-reaching impacts on other infrastructures and jeopardize the functioning of the whole system. While certain infrastructures have been considered highly critical and their dependencies and protection has been addressed extensively and for decades, others have been considered less or not at all critical and have been barely debated. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented strain on infrastructure systems and has revealed that different infrastructures become highly critical throughout an ongoing and long-lasting crisis than during a sudden but short-term crisis. This paper investigates the representation of critical infrastructure dependency descriptions in the literature before and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this qualitative study, the quantity of descriptions per critical infrastructure dependency is analyzed and visualized and used to discuss the perception of how critical those infrastructures are. The study revealed that new infrastructures have been identified as critical in recent literature and that the focus was shifted to specific infrastructures that were in more pressing need during the pandemic. This shift of focus was observed to happen from the sectors of energy, water, transport & traffic, and ICT before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to the sectors public health, constitutional institutions, transport & traffic, and food since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, analysis of the literature revealed infrastructures which had previously not been classified as critical, being discussed as new critical infrastructures. Urban green spaces, for example, have proven to be essential for the health and well-being of citizens during lockdown times. Further, social services like childcare, care of the elderly, delivery services, and online grocery shopping have been highlighted as essential services for maintaining workforces and the functioning of society during a pandemic. Overall, the analysis of descriptions of critical infrastructure dependencies before and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed changes in the focus on critical infrastructures and in the perception of what makes critical infrastructures critical.