Briefing · Focus area
Infrastructure resilience is the ability of power, water, transport and communications networks to keep working, or recover quickly, when climate hazards strike. Because these networks depend on each other, one failure can spread to others.
Date reviewed: . Source publication dates are shown with each source.
What the evidence says
The UK government's 2022 climate risk assessment rates risks to infrastructure networks (water, energy, transport and ICT) from cascading failures as very high, now and in later periods. It lists this among the risk areas where UK-wide damages by 2050 are estimated to exceed £1 billion a year under 2°C of warming.
Limitations: these are national, scenario-based estimates from a 2022 assessment. They do not describe the condition of any particular asset or place, and they are not a forecast of specific failures.
UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2022 ↗ · UK government (Defra), drawing on the Climate Change Committee's independent assessment ·
01
The government's 2022 risk assessment names climate-related failure of the power system as one of eight priority risk areas needing urgent UK-wide action. It notes that exposure grows as homes, heating and transport depend more on electricity.
Which sites, customers and services would be hit first by a local outage during a flood or heatwave, and what backup or redesign is proportionate?
02
The same assessment rates risks to public water supplies as high. Separately, the Environment Agency projects a potential public water supply deficit in England of up to 5 billion litres a day by 2055 without action, under its planning scenario.
Where could demand reduction, reuse, storage or leakage work reduce pressure on a specific catchment or site?
03
Risks to transport networks from slope and embankment failure, and risks to infrastructure services from river, surface water and groundwater flooding, are both assessed as medium to very high.
Which routes, depots or embankments matter most to a local economy, and what monitoring or drainage work would show early warning signs?
Our interpretation, not a finding of the sources
National risk ratings become useful when they are tied to a real place, asset or service. We want to help operators, businesses and communities name a specific dependency, then bring in the engineering, data and commercial expertise needed to test a response.
Promising areas to explore include mapping dependencies between networks at a local level, early monitoring of vulnerable assets, and backup arrangements for critical sites. Each would need evaluation in its setting; we do not claim guaranteed benefits or returns.
No projects, partners or results are claimed here.
Tell us about a specific network risk you face, or the capability you could contribute.