EURA 2025 – Emerging Scholar Award

EURA 2025 Emerging Scholar Award

Paper Title:

Regulating Urban Resilience: The need for Interconnected Standards and Responsibilities for climate change resilience for the UK Urban areas.

Abstract
The infrastructure on which cities depend is increasingly vulnerable to disruptions and damage caused by extreme weather events worsened and made more frequent by climate change. Furthermore, as our infrastructure systems become more interdependent single failures can lead to multiple or cascading failures across systems. There are no official standards of resilience, however the National Resilience Strategy sets out the need for an evaluation of resilience to inform decision making around adaptation planning and a holistic resilience standard that acknowledges interdependencies across infrastructure systems has been called for by the National Infrastructure Commission.
Responsibility for resilience and adaptation planning is currently shared between government agencies, private sector companies and utility providers, businesses and individual property owners. There are some 427 public bodies and agencies working under the legal frameworks set by the 24 ministerial government departments – none have a minimum standard for climate change resilience. The wider context driving the need for a resilience standard involves identifying how infrastructure makes cities habitable and prosperous, understanding how the effective operation of a city’s infrastructure supports the determinants of wellbeing, and setting out the socioeconomic consequences of a lack of resilience.
This paper investigates the issues around the establishment of a place based holistic resilience assessment framework, the range of infrastructure that arguably must be included, the establishment of an ex-ante benchmark reference point, the indicators and metrics to be utilised, the extent of disruption to be anticipated and the types of forecasting output that can inform town planning decisions and adaptation pathways. The paper will investigate how such a tool will give city planners the ability to understand where people are at most risk of disruptions, or being displaced, and why, recognising cross sector interdependencies, and setting out the consequences on noncompliance with the standard or resulting forecast’s recommendations.