How Do We Ensure the Assessment of Infrastructure Resilience is Proportionate to the Risk?

Abstract: As infrastructure becomes increasing integral to daily lives, society becomes more vulnerable to potential failures. We mitigate against this by investing some of the increased prosperity afforded by infrastructure to treat the most salient risks and increase the resilience of the system. Therefore we enter a cycle where our ability to identify and prioritise vulnerabilities is crucial to the future development of infrastructure. It is easy to compose a list of risks occupying the whole spectrum from probable through to fanciful, but, how do infrastructure owners define defensible boundaries between the credible risks they should assess and those that can be set aside? This paper tests the hypothesis that incorporating information on the uncertainty of risk assessments provides risk managers with a more robust process to justify their choice of credible risks. Citation: Holmes, M., Provost, A., Clucas, D. & Wilkinson, S. (2014). How Do We Ensure the Assessment of Infrastructure Resilience is Proportionate to the Risk?. In: Campbell P. and Perez P. (Eds), Proceedings of the International Symposium of Next Generation Infrastructure, 1-4 October 2013, SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, Australia.