Resourcefulness requires identifying response strategies, prioritizing damage control actions, and mobilizing responses for recovery – i.e., designing processes and identifying and ensuring access to the resources that will be required in the case of a failure. In close relation, rapid recovery is supported by contingency planning, implementation of emergency response procedures, and plans to deploy resources and labor power to return operations to normal.

# Resilience in Infrastructure Decision Making

Over the past few years, governments and their multilateral partners have increasingly recognized the importance of incorporating climate and disaster resilience considerations into infrastructure development plans and related construction and financing decisions. In order to more effectively prepare for uncertain geographical and hydrometeorological events, governments are being challenged to consider a wider set of options for increasing structural resistance and improving process-oriented resilience measures.

The potential medium- and long-term benefits of increased resilience must be considered alongside the short-term costs of resilient design and implementation. Proposed infrastructure projects must be compared and appraised in a manner that considers the costs and benefits of various options over the entire life-span of an asset, which often spans decades. The likely performance of infrastructure systems subject to natural hazards may be considered according to several parameters including damage probability, socioeconomic costs, business interruptions due to disrupted service, costs of repair, and other losses of functionality, all over the whole lifecycle of the asset or system.<sup>20</sup> The need to consider multiple and whole-lifecycle factors in the face of climate and disaster uncertainty has led to rich discussions on _how_ resilience may be incorporated into project design and selection. The challenge of organizing an expanded set of considerations into a functional and effective decision framework underpins the work documented in this report, which tests one approach to operationalizing resilience. This approach utilizes quantifiable resilience indicators that may be considered alongside other social, financial, economic, and environmental decision factors to inform project selection. That said, the expansive conceptual nature of resilience does not lend to the total quantification of all aspects of resilience. As such, the effort herein attempts to capture a few of the most significant vulnerabilities associated with potential natural disasters in order to at least partially bring resilience considerations into project design and selection processes.

The objective of this paper is to estimate the resiliency benefits for key socio-economic aspects under different road-upgradation scenarios and compare the results with regards to the related costs. The test case used is the East Road of the Malaita Road Network in the Solomon Islands, which has been selected primarily to pilot the methodology and examine its applicability. The parameters selected to measure resiliency were based on the key benefits the road provides to the people living around it – i.e. economic benefits proxied by travel time, access to hospitals and access to markets. In general, access to schools would also be a key parameter, but, in the case of Malaita, it was not considered a key functionality, as most primary students walk to school and most secondary students board at their schools during the week. Therefore, the road disruption causes very marginal interruption to this access. Since it was found that there were severe data constraints in Malaita, the report is based primarily on expert-inputs as well as geospatial data. It considers mainly technical improvements to road upgradation that might impact resiliency. However, it is acknowledged that other improvements on aspects such as maintenance contracts and availability of maintenance/repair funds can also positively benefit the ability of a road asset to recover faster post disruption.

> 20 Ibid.

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