Infrastructure is the physical conditioning of our environment and experience. It can include roads and bridges, sewage systems and parks, ecological buffer zones, such as wetlands or mangroves, that help to protect human society against shock events. It is also the informational systems that keep us aware, informed, and able to adapt to changing circumstances.

Weather services are infrastructure, as are the satellites in orbit that support them and the publicly funded space agencies that maintain optimal launch capabilities and ongoing operations of those platforms. Health services, and the scientific research that helps them advance, improve, and function, are infrastructure, too. So are banking and financial services. 

It is right, and necessary, twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, to think about flood defenses, drainage systems, roads, and transit, as the kind of climate-sensitive infrastructure we all need, to be secure in our communities. It is also the case that we need climate sensitive infrastructure of these other kinds—informational, medical, scientific, and financial.

Sustainable Development Goal number 9, one of 17 global goals adopted in September 2015 by the member states of the United Nations, links physical infrastructure to industrial capacity, technology, innovation, including telecommunications and access to information. Data systems are part of the infrastructure that makes it possible to know and to navigate our world, for the constructive improvement of human experience, at all levels.

Sustainable Development Goal number 11 points to the universal need for sustainable cities and communities. While all of the SDGs are related to this goal, SDG11 specifically calls for disaster risk reduction, sustainable transport, locally rooted redesign and upgrading, as well as attention to the ability of local communities to withstand, learn from, and overcome crises. All of this requires more detailed risk and resilience information.

We need to know more about planetary systems, and about how they affect us locally, and we need more finely tuned services that convert that underlying capacity into everyday security and added value. Not having such services puts affected communities at risk. Adopting a politics of denial does not provide protection, nor will it help ensure funds that must come from elsewhere will arrive. 

Whether for political or budgetary reasons, declining to support economy-wide enhancement of climate resilience and preparedness will not save money; it will only increase risk to life and property, and to the stability and longevity of vulnerable communities. 

Ocean waters along Arctic coastlines have been alarmingly hotter than normal in recent months. 

This tells us something about the viability of Arctic sea ice, and the polar region anchor effect, which helps to stabilize climate bands at lower latitudes. This, in turn, gives us information about glacial ice melt rates, sea level rise, and how likely it is ocean temperatures will be warm enough to generate more tropical storms and more destructive hurricanes. 

So, given the rising cost and risk associated with climate disrpution, it is worth asking: What kind of climate-sensitive infrastructure is needed in your community? 

• everyday weather services?
• roads and bridges?
• early warning systems?
• emergency services?
• policy support for risk reduction?
• improved natural (green) infrastructure, to support better flood control?
• health science and services?
• food production, storage, and distribution?
• banking and insurance?
• a combination of some or all of these?

The degree to which your city or town has what it needs can be quantified as a measure of Active Value, linked to risk, solvency, safety, and opportunity. Cities, towns, provincial governments, and national policy planning, can all be rated for the Active Value, and for risks and projected future costs associated with lagging behind the demands imposed by ongoing climate disruption.

For reference, we look at three examples: 

• Early warning and emergency services: Where climate and weather services allow for effective, fine-tuned, locally relevant and precise early warning of shock events, fewer people are harmed or killed, emergency response can be planned and mobilized more effectively, and the overall damage and cost of a disaster can be reduced. This has secondary effects through time, as household, small-business, and government budgets are less strained.
• Resilient roads and bridges: When climate-driven natural disasters strike, roads and bridges are needed to get rescuers and supplies into the affected area. The more resilient the built infrastructure, the more likely it will remain functional at the crucial time, when lives are on the line, when it is possible to reach, feed, and save entire communities. The habitability and insurability of towns and regions is shaped, in part, by this question of direct accessbility in a time of crisis.
• Climate-sensitive banking and insurance: Banking and insurance services that are not climate sensitive may prioritize artificial values that are less stable and durable than projected. This means communities, cities and regions, and vital supply chains, may find themselves investing in ways that add, instead of reducing vulnerability. Climate-sensitive banking accounts for hidden risk and resilience value and makes it easier to identify and support practices that reduce material risk for everyone and make future expenditures more efficient and value-building.

Once you start to add the risk and resilience question to each of these areas of concern, it is easy to see the many ways they connect to and influence each other.

Climate data, weather services, early warning systems, emergency planning and response, the resilience of roads and bridges, and the climate-sensitivity of banking and insurance services, all shape the adaptive capacity of a community, city, region, or supply chain. This will ultimately determine whether a given place will be seen as worthy of time and investment or an unsustainable risk.

Key additional questions are:

• What level of proportional risk might be faced by anyone in the local or regional context? 
• How can local actors cooperatively de-risk operations and right-scale adaptive capacity benefits?
• Are supply chains being fine-tuned to eliminate preventable risk?