Critical infrastructures are the backbone of modern, interconnected economies. The disruption of key systems and essential services - such as telecommunications, energy or water supply, transportation or finance - can cause substantial economic damage. This report looks at how to boost critical infrastructure resilience in a dynamic risk landscape, and discusses policy options and governance models to promote up-front resilience investments. Based on an international survey, the report analyses the progressive shift of critical infrastructure policies from asset protection to system resilience. The findings are reflected in a proposed Policy Toolkit for the Governance of Critical Infrastructure Resilience, which can guide governments in taking a more coherent, preventive approach to protecting and sustaining essential services.

Critical infrastructures are the backbone of modern, interconnected economies. The disruption of key systems and essential services - such as telecommunications, energy or water supply, transportation or finance - can cause substantial economic damage. This report looks at how to boost critical infrastructure resilience in a dynamic risk landscape, and discusses policy options and governance models to promote up-front resilience investments.

Critical infrastructures are the backbone of modern, interconnected economies. The disruption of key systems and essential services - such as telecommunications, energy or water supply, transportation or finance - can cause substantial economic damage. This report looks at how to boost critical infrastructure resilience in a dynamic risk landscape, and discusses policy options and governance models to promote up-front resilience investments. Based on an international survey, the report analyses the progressive shift of critical infrastructure policies from asset protection to system resilience. The findings are reflected in a proposed Policy Toolkit for the Governance of Critical Infrastructure Resilience, which can guide governments in taking a more coherent, preventive approach to protecting and sustaining essential services.

This text offers comprehensive and principled, yet practical, guidelines to critical infrastructures resilience. Extreme events and stresses, including those that may be unprecedented but are no longer surprising, have disproportionate effects on critical infrastructures and hence on communities, cities, and megaregions. Critical infrastructures include buildings and bridges, dams, levees, and sea walls, as well as power plants and chemical factories, besides lifeline networks such as multimodal transportation, power grids, communication, and water or wastewater. The growing interconnectedness of natural-built-human systems causes cascading infrastructure failures and necessitates simultaneous recovery. This text explores the new paradigm centered on the concept of resilience by approaching the challenges posed by globalization, climate change, and growing urbanization on critical infrastructures and key resources through the combination of policy and engineering perspectives. It identifies solutions that are scientifically credible, data driven, and sound in engineering principles while concurrently informed by and supportive of social and policy imperatives. Critical Infrastructures Resilience will be of interest to students of engineering and policy.

In the face of increasing failures, comments attributed to Albert Einstein loom large: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” There is a pervasive feeling that any attempt to make sense of the current terrain of complex systems must involve thinking outside the box and originating unconventional approaches that integrate organizational, managerial, social, political, cultural, and human aspects and their interactions. This textbook offers research-based models and tools for diagnosing and predicting the behavior of complex techno-socio-economic systems in the domain of critical infrastructures, key resources, key assets and the open bazaar of space, undersea, and below-ground systems. These models exemplify emblematic models in physics, within which the critical infrastructures, as well as society itself and its paraphernalia, share the profile of many-body systems featuring cooperative phenomena and phase transitions – the latter usually felt as disruptive occurrences. The book and its models focus on the analytics of real-life-business actors, including policy-makers, financiers and insurers, industry managers, and emergency responders.

The world moves on Critical Information Infrastructures, and their resilience and protection is of vital importance. Starting with some basic definitions and assumptions on the topic, this book goes on to explore various aspects of Critical Infrastructures throughout the world – including the technological, political, economic, strategic and defensive. This book will be of interest to the CEO and Academic alike as they grapple with how to prepare Critical Information Infrastructures for new challenges.