Publication:
Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (9.45 MB)
26,075 downloads
English PDF (4.32 MB)
7,794 downloads
English PDF (8.31 MB)
2,776 downloads
Other Files
French PDF (7.36 MB)
5,284 downloads
Japanese PDF (21.43 MB)
927 downloads
Date
2019-06-19
ISSN
Published
2019-06-19
Editor(s)
Abstract
From serving our most basic needs to enabling our most ambitious ventures in trade and technology, infrastructure services are essential for raising and maintaining people’s quality of life. Yet millions of people, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are facing the consequences of unreliable electricity grids, inadequate water and sanitation systems, and overstrained transport networks. Natural hazards magnify the challenges faced by these fragile systems. Building on a wide range of case studies, global empirical analyses, and modeling exercises, Lifelines lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure. Lifelines concludes by identifying five obstacles to resilient infrastructure and offering concrete recommendations and specific actions that can be taken by governments, stakeholders, and the international community to improve the quality and resilience of these essential services, and thereby contribute to more resilient and prosperous societies.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, Julie. 2019. Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity. Sustainable Infrastructure;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31805 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Beyond the Gap
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-02-19) Rozenberg, Julie; Fay, Marianne; Rozenberg, Julie; Fay, Marianne; Fox, Charles J.E.; Leifman, Michael M.; Lopez-Alascio, Blanca; Nicolas, Claire
    Beyond the Gap: How Countries Can Afford the Infrastructure They Need while Protecting the Planet aims to shift the debate regarding investment needs away from a simple focus on spending more and toward a focus on spending better on the right objectives, using relevant metrics. It does so by offering a careful and systematic approach to estimating the funding needs to close the service gaps in water and sanitation, transportation, electricity, irrigation, and flood protection. Exploring thousands of scenarios, this report finds that funding needs depend on the service goals and policy choices of low- and middle-income countries and could range anywhere from 2 percent to 8 percent of GDP per year by 2030. Beyond the Gap also identifies a policy mix that will enable countries to achieve key international goals—universal access to water, sanitation, and electricity; greater mobility; improved food security; better protection from floods; and eventual full decarbonization—while limiting spending on new infrastructure to 4.5 percent of GDP per year. Importantly, the exploration of thousands of scenarios shows that infrastructure investment paths compatible with full decarbonization in the second half of the century need not cost more than more-polluting alternatives. Investment needs remain at 2 percent to 8 percent of GDP even when only the decarbonized scenarios are examined. The actual amount depends on the quality and quantity of services targeted, the timing of investments, construction costs, and complementary policies. Finally, investing in infrastructure is not enough; maintaining it also matters. Improving services requires much more than capital expenditure. Ensuring a steady flow of resources for operations and maintenance is a necessary condition for success. Good maintenance also generates substantial savings by reducing the total life-cycle cost of transport and water and sanitation infrastructure by more than 50 percent.
  • Publication
    Climate Change and Poverty : An Analytical Framework
    (World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Bonzanigo, Laura; Fay, Marianne; Narloch, Ulf; Rozenberg, Julie; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien
    Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty outcomes by examining three questions: the (static) impact on poor people's livelihood and well-being; the impact on the risk for non-poor individuals to fall into poverty; and the impact on the ability of poor people to escape poverty. The paper proposes four channels that determine household consumption and through which households may escape or fall into poverty (prices, assets, productivity, and opportunities). It then discusses whether and how these channels are affected by climate change and climate policies, focusing on the exposure, vulnerability, and ability to adapt of the poor (and those vulnerable to poverty). It reviews the existing literature and offers three major conclusions. First, climate change is likely to represent a major obstacle to a sustained eradication of poverty. Second, climate policies are compatible with poverty reduction provided that (i) poverty concerns are carefully taken into account in their design and (ii) they are accompanied by the appropriate set of social policies. Third, climate change does not modify how poverty policies should be designed, but it creates greater needs and more urgency. The scale issue is explained by the fact that climate will cause more frequent and more severe shocks; the urgency, by the need to exploit the window of opportunity given to us before climate impacts are likely to substantially increase.
  • Publication
    From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Espinet Alegre, Xavier; Rozenberg, Julie; Fox, Charles; Koks, Elco; Hallegatte, Stephane; Tariverdi, Mersedeh; Rentschler, Jun; Avner, Paolo
    Reliable transport infrastructure is one of the backbones of a prosperous economy, providingaccess to markets, jobs and social services. Sustainable Development Goal 9 (SDG9) calls forincreased access to sustainable transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.Collectively, these countries will need to spend between 0.5 percent and 3.3 percent of their GDPannually (157 billion to 1 trillion US Dollars) in new transport infrastructure by 2030 – plus an additional 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP to maintain their network – depending on their ambition and their efficiency in service delivery (Rozenberg and Fay, 2019). Because of the wide spatial distribution of transport infrastructure, many transport assets are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, increasing costs for national transport agencies and operators. During the 2015 floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, the repair of transport assets contributed approximately 60 percent of the total damage cost (GFDRR, 2015). In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, accessibility as measured by the length of open networks directly after the shock dropped by 86 percent for highways and by 71 percent for railways (Kazama and Noda, 2012b). Such transport disruptions necessarily have direct impacts on the local economy. Employees face difficulties commuting, access to firms is disrupted for clients, interruptions in the supply chain inhibit production, and finished products cannot be easily shipped (Kajitani and Tatano, 2014). The paper, prepared as background material for the Lifelines report on infrastructure resilience, summarizes the main findings on the risk faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change, and the main recommendations for building more resilient transport networks. It starts by describing how transport disruptions affect firms and households either directly and through supply chains. It then proposes a range of approaches and solutions for building more resilient transport networks, showing that the additional cost of resilience is not high if resources are well spent. Finally, it provides a set of practical recommendations.
  • Publication
    Infrastructure Disruptions
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Obolensky, Marguerite; Erman, Alvina; Rozenberg, Julie; Rentschler, Jun; Hallegatte, Stephane; Avner, Paolo
    This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap. Disruptions and irregular service have adverse effects on household welfare, due to missed work and education opportunities, and negative impact on health. Calibrating costs of unreliable infrastructure on existing willingness to pay assessments, we estimate the welfare losses associated with blackouts and water outages. Overall, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of GDP would be lost each year because of unreliable infrastructure -- electricity, water and transport.
  • Publication
    Adaptation Principles
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-17) Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, Julie
    Effective action on resilience and climate change adaptation can be a complex task—requiring coordinated efforts from the highest levels of government to individual households and firms. The Adaptation Principles offer a guide to effective climate change adaptation, containing hands-on guidance to the design, implementation and monitoring of national adaptation strategies. It specifies six guiding principles, which correspond to common policy domains: 1) Ensuring resilient foundations through rapid and inclusive development; 2) Facilitating the adaptation of firms and people; 3) Adapting land use and protecting critical public assets and services; 4) Increasing people’s capacity to cope with and recover from shocks; 5) Anticipating and managing macroeconomic and fiscal risks; 6) Ensuring effective implementation through prioritization and continuous monitoring. While outlining these universal Adaptation Principles, this guide shows that each country needs to tailor these actions to its specific needs and priorities. To guide this process, Adaptation Principles offers concrete and practical tools: Screening questions to identify the most urgent and effective actions, toolboxes illustrating common datasets and methodologies to support decisions, indicators to monitor and evaluate progress, and case studies on how the COVID-19 pandemic influences priorities in taking effective adaptation action.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008
    (2009-06-01) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
  • Publication
    Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04) Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Klapper, Leora
    This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
  • Publication
    Design Thinking for Social Innovation
    (2010-07) Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn
    Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.