On 5th November, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction Mami Mizutori proposed the idea of a “Net Resilience Gain” to complement the Net-Zero Asset manager initiative at a UNDRR webinar in the lead up to COP26 “Accelerating financing for climate and disaster risk prevention and de-risking investment” [UNDRR story here]. The proposal, which coincided with #COP26, and is highly relevant to the #COP26 and UNFCCC #RacetoResilience theme, has its origins in a collaboration between the UCL Infrastructure Systems Institute and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).
The collaboration has led to development of draft principles for resilient infrastructure, called the SPACES Framework. These proposed principles will undergo a global consultation to validate and pave the way for implementation. Upon completion, the next step will be a SPACES Framework Handbook authored by members of the UCL team: Zahra Mahabadi, Dr Lauren McMillan, Yuchun Tang, UKCRIC Co-ordination Node Senior Research Associate Dr Tom Dolan, UKCRIC Co-ordination Node Principal, Professor Liz Varga.
To ensure implementation of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and Sustainable Development Goals, the concept of Net Resilience Gain was identified and proposed alongside, the principles for infrastructure resilience. The team’s purpose in proposing the concept was to enable application of a wider ‘net gain’ philosophy to thinking on systemic resilience, in particular, the resilience of National Infrastructure systems. It is intended to be both complimentary, and analogous, to the better known, and widely used Biodiversity Net Gain Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity, and Environmental Net Gain Principles. The initial idea of applying ‘Net gain’ principles to the systemic resilience of National Infrastructure has its roots in earlier research undertaken by UKCRIC, by Dr Tom Dolan [article] and [paper]. A briefing note on the concept will be published on the UKCRIC and ISI websites in the near future.