Integrating a City’s Existing Infrastructure Vulnerabilities and Carbon Footprint for Achieving City-Wide Sustainability and Resilience Goals

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. View Full-Text