In the face of unprecedented climate extremes, entire cities must be built to bounce back, adapt and thrive.
Words by Chris Sheedy
As transmission towers across Queensland and Victoria are knocked down by extreme winds, homes in NSW partially collapse into the sea, and bridges and culverts in remote regions are destroyed by bushfires, severing lifelines to rural communities, serious questions are being asked about resilience in the built environment.
In an age of climate change, engineering is experiencing entirely new challenges that suggest something more than building to code is required.
In the Australian engineering space, the standards, roles and expectations are shifting dramatically as a new realisation dawns: mitigation of disasters alone simply won’t cut it.
“It’s possible resilience still means the same thing that it always has, but our context has changed,” said engineer Samantha Peart, Global Head of Sustainability for Hassell.
“Different shocks and stresses have come to the fore. Previously, we’ve had a lot of focus on designing out risk, as opposed to adaptation. But now, adaptation is becoming more of a focus as science tells us the actions we’ve taken thus far are not mitigating the risks.”
Michael Nolan, Principal and Director of Climate Risk and Resilience at Aurecon, agreed. “We’re seeing greater failures as impacts are larger than the buffers we design as engineers,” he said.
The climate has already shifted, it seems, but the codes haven’t caught up.
“If everyone automatically uses current engineering and design standards, that’s great – if climate change has been already factored in,” Nolan said. “But there are a lot of design standards that we’ll be waiting another 10 years before they upgrade, maybe even longer. They all really need to factor it in – now.
“A good example is the massive number of transmission towers going up as part of the renewable energy transmission infrastructure, using the existing standards which don’t incorporate increasing extreme wind from micro-storms. We’ve already seen multiple failures in the last three years.”
Infrastructure failures have also revealed themselves in Brisbane and Lismore as a result of floods, across NSW and Victoria during fires, in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland after cyclones, rain and supercell storms during South Australian heatwaves, and elsewhere.
“What’s the difference between designing out risk and designing for adaptation?” Peart said. “It’s rarely that black-and-white, but take flooding as an example – one approach builds barriers to keep water out; the other accepts its inevitability to a certain extent and asks how spaces can adapt, absorb and even benefit from it.
“For residential buildings, there once was a focus on designing out active conditioning systems – reducing energy use, cutting emissions and minimising climate impact. But now, instead of naturally ventilated buildings that eliminate air conditioning, we’re seeing advocacy for airtight buildings where active cooling systems are smaller and highly efficient, and where ventilation happens in a controlled, optimised way.”
We once engineered and designed with the idea of controlling nature, Peart said. However, the more severe the weather events, the more those control mechanisms are failing.
Then there’s the fact that resilience is about a lot more than weather.
Broader than climate
While resilience in engineering is heavily driven by climate change-induced extreme weather events, the topic is much broader than that.
Adam Davis, AECOM’s Technical Director, Sustainability and Resilience, said resilience is not just about infrastructure bouncing back after an extreme weather shock event. It’s also about the vulnerability of people, services, governance arrangements and natural ecosystems.
Davis was involved in the Rockefeller Foundation’s work as part of the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, intended to “help cities around the world become more resilient to natural, social and economic shocks and stresses”.
“They adopted the global definition of resilience, which was more a systems-based approach to addressing disruptions,” Davis said. “It defines resilience as the capacity of a city’s systems, businesses, institutions, communities and individuals to survive, adapt and grow, no matter what kinds of acute shocks and chronic stresses they experience.”
A classic example, he said, was the fact that New York City’s Emergency Management team was planning and preparing for a major hurricane event. However, during the decade leading up to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the city suffered a major terrorism event and an anthrax attack in 2001, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007, a passenger plane crashing in the Hudson River in 2009, as well as other serious infrastructure failures, and more.
“They came to the realisation that they needed to apply a holistic approach to address all types of shocks,” he said. “Through the work from the Rockefeller Foundation and more, a lot of government agencies and industry groups have adopted a similar approach to resilience planning.”
Nolan, also referring to New York’s resilience planning, said a lot of effort went into convincing the client to raise the runways, taxiways and aprons at John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) by one metre. That effort paid off when Hurricane Sandy hit, with JFK being the only operating airport in the state of New York.
“LaGuardia Airport was out of action for six to eight weeks,” he said. “It also meant that emergency responses, and other things that reduce the cost of a disaster, were greatly improved.”
For companies working in high-risk and confined-space environments, resilience must go beyond conventional responses. Ervin Hung, Strategic Solutions Operations Manager at pipeline infrastructure solutions provider Interflow, explained that resilience is also about continually innovating the approach to complex engineering challenges.
“There must be a priority on solution designs at the concept stage to incorporate key themes, such as lowest carbon footprint for the entire lifecycle of the proposed solution, engineering out critical safety risks and advancing trenchless water technologies,” Hung said. “Every solution we develop must consider and prioritise these elements.
“It means when we make decisions, we are in the right headspace to not just consider excellent design principles, but also the safety of our people, a constant reduction of our carbon footprint and a drive to utilise leading trenchless technologies.”
Even in the pipe maintenance and repair space, resilience is about more than the environment.
And so, Davis said, organisations such as the NSW Reconstruction Authority are now going to great lengths to understand the community criticality of assets as part of disaster adaptation planning.
“It’s about enabling informed investment in the right places,” Davis said.
However, Nolan argues that it’s not happening fast enough. The cost of resilience must be factored into all infrastructure investment decisions.
“It can actually result in a lower cost of capital,” he said. “But right now, the conversation isn’t mature enough.”
Fail-safe versus fail-soft
When the concept of mitigation was a greater focus than adaptation, the concept of “fail-safe” was the priority. And in many infrastructure and other projects it still is, for good reason.
While fail-safe remains the ideal, the reality of legacy networks and operational constraints means engineers must plan for both.
“Engineers aim to design for fail-safe systems that prevent further escalation by isolating faults quickly,” said Ervin Hung, Strategic Solutions Operations Manager at Interflow. “But in practice, we’re often working with ageing pipelines where immediate replacement isn’t possible at times. That’s where fail-soft principles come in, building in the ability to detect, respond and maintain partial service when things don’t go to plan.”
In trenchless rehabilitation, where access and disruption must be minimised, this approach translates into smart monitoring, staged renewals and prioritising high-risk assets. It’s not about accepting failure; rather, it’s about managing it wisely when it happens, without compromising safety or service delivery.
In the built environment, a good example is the renaturalisation of surface water courses in urban environments.
Rather than a straight, concrete canal designed to channel water away as quickly as possible during a significant rain event, there is an acceptance that flooding will sometimes occur. As a result, a fail-soft option is a meandering stream, where the community can walk the footpaths, and enjoy the plant and bird life, but which also copes with flood events thanks to its soft surface.
“You’ve got to design with nature, as opposed to against it,” Peart said. “Engineers must plan how this can happen, and allow for the quality of life or use of the space to continue, or pause and rehabilitate in the quickest way possible.”
Considering the neighbours
Rebecca Miller, SMEC’s ANZ Manager for Sustainable Futures, has long held roles that explore the relationship between physical and social infrastructure. Resilience in its true form, she said, is about the consideration of a broad range of externalities, of a diverse and cascading range of shocks and stresses.
“Take a heatwave in Western Sydney, for example,” said Miller, who was involved in the early days of the Resilient Sydney program of works, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation. “A heatwave represents a shock event, but key stressors that underpin and amplify the impact of a heatwave can vary, and include societal challenges such as housing affordability, or lack thereof.”
This brings issues such as social equity and poverty into the resilience discussion. On other projects, such as those associated with delivering large-scale transport infrastructure, for instance, other issues may come into play. These might include planning for and responding to digital network failures, pandemics and physical terrorist attacks.
“If parents are on a train to pick up their kids from school or daycare, and end up stuck or stranded, we need to consider the knock-on effect,” Miller said. “Resilience is about interdependency and interconnectivity.”
Too much of modern-day engineering is about drawing a line around a site and only considering what happens within that line, Peart said.
“Engineers and other built environment professionals are often engaged to work within a clearly defined site boundary – the red line around the building or plot of land. But too often, that boundary becomes a blind spot. Aside from utility connections like energy and water, we rarely consider the broader systems that the project is part of,” she said.
And so we end up with issues such as the flood wall around Victoria’s Flemington Racecourse that an independent report found contributed to increased flooding across hundreds of neighbouring homes and businesses.
“That is an example of not considering the systemic impacts of interventions,” Peart said. “That has to change – every project needs to be understood in its full climatic, ecological, social and economic context, to ensure places and spaces are resilient and adaptive and are not creating problems for others.”
Identifying opportunity
Engineering for resilience isn’t just about focusing on and planning for potential negatives. The assumption of a broader point of view enables the identification of opportunity, Peart said.
“Our approach includes examining biodiversity, transport and natural systems,” she said. “We assess social dimensions such as social value, health and wellbeing, and inclusion. Physical factors such as flooding risk, sunlight access, energy supply and local context also play a role. We apply these multiple lenses at the site level, then progressively outward, recognising the interconnected systems that extend beyond immediate boundaries.
“We’re changing the way we understand [a] place before we start engaging in design. We can see our spheres of influence, and leverage our position with more knowledge to get change happening. Perhaps we can adapt to flooding rather than cause it. Perhaps we can partner to integrate energy storage on a site to benefit the broader community.”
Miller, who helped develop the resilience category and credits for the Infrastructure Sustainability Council’s rating tools in a past role, and who was also the inaugural Chair of the Expert Reference Panel on Climate Change and Resilience for the Green Building Council of Australia, said some engineering and construction businesses are already doing excellent work around this.
“Landcom has done great work in this space with regards to community resilience,” she said. “The team at Stockland also thinks about things differently in their project delivery.”
An example she shared is related to one of Stockland’s Queensland shopping centres, where they’re not just thinking about environmental design, but social outcomes too.
“They don’t just have change facilities for parents with babies – they also have adult change facilities and quiet spaces where elderly people can rest and reorientate themselves.”
Role of engineers
What does all of this mean for engineers? They need to be in design conversations at the earliest possible stage, Hung said.
“Even engineers with very specific knowledge focusing on one particular part of the process can add great value to that front-end process,” he said.
Davis described another good reason engineers belong in those early planning discussions – when a major event occurs, it is engineers who will be required to get things up and running again.
“Because of that,” he said, “they have the greatest knowledge and tangible experience in coming up with solutions or actions to address all of the risks.”
Peart said engineers need to feel empowered by the knowledge that their advocacy and influence skills are just as important as their technical skills.
“Feel empowered to do more than just respond to the brief. Feel empowered to go further upstream. That technical depth and curiosity is special; it can help convince people to do something differently to get better outcomes. Sometimes, engineers don’t feel like they could or should do that, but they must.”
Government action
Across the nation, state and federal authorities are stepping up their resilience planning processes and practices. However, current progress is uneven and sometimes occurs in stops and starts.
“Infrastructure Australia has embedded resilience into its assessment framework for infrastructure,” said Davis. “At the state level, some authorities are well ahead. Transport for NSW, for example, has been embedding climate resilience considerations into delivery for over a decade.
“The NSW Reconstruction Authority is also proactive in this space. They’re undertaking resilience planning for all regions across the state.
“Across these regional areas, they’re developing an understanding of the resilience of assets that support its communities, and what disasters they are most vulnerable to. They’re engaging with local councils and asset operators as part of this planning process,
and will use the information collected to help inform future adaptation planning and investment decisions.”
However, the same levels of commitment and maturity are not apparent across all states.
For engineers, Davis said, this evolving landscape contains a call to action. They need to be at the table at the earliest stage in infrastructure delivery to help other stakeholders understand design thresholds, tolerances and interdependencies that could make or break a system, and to help plan the next generation of resilient infrastructure.
This story was originally published in the August 2025 issue of create with the headline, “Engineering for a storm of change”.
The Hydrology and Water Resources Symposium in November will explore the state of current hydrology and water knowledges that can inform decision-making.
Further reading
