With a changing climate impacting the economy, infrastructure and more, building resilience in the built environment has never been so important.
By Lachlan Haycock, Joseph Harding and Chris Sheedy
From destructive extreme weather events to major economic losses, resilience in the built environment is more vital than ever.
The intensity and frequency of natural disasters and wild weather have increased markedly in recent years, with a significantly greater area of the world being impacted by disasters such as droughts and floods.
The chart below depicts the monthly intensity of droughts and floods by global area affected, from January 2003 to December 2024.
Natural disasters exacerbated by a changing climate also exert a heavy impact on the economy.
Since the 1970s, the economic cost of these disasters has increased sevenfold, with the global cost increasing from an annual average of $198 billion in the 1970s to $1.6 trillion in the 2010s.
OECD data reveals economic losses from extreme events impacted or caused by a changing climate, as shown in the below charts.
Infrastructure impact
From flooding to droughts to bushfires, climate change affects the built environment, and transport and energy systems in different ways.
As identified by the OECD, here are just some of the impacts, which reveal an across-the-board effort towards building resilience.
Sea level rise is one of the more obvious impacts of climate change, according to Arne Nilsen FIEAust CPEng, Design Director at Aurecon, whose background is in maritime infrastructure.
“Engineers design maritime structures so extreme waves will pass underneath them or not exceed the height of a structure, for example,” he told create. “But when there’s a step change – if an elevated sea level comes up and waves go over a structure’s height – suddenly you have a huge additional load to deal with.
“This changes the situation completely in terms of the impact disasters exert on the built environment.”
The damage done to the Lucinda Bulk Sugar Terminal in 2011 is a prime example.
“Cyclone Yasi caused a lot of damage. Waves came up and hit the superstructure, tore through the conveyor galleries, and actually lifted up the concrete deck and smashed it down back onto the steel structure.
“It was out of action for a whole season – a total of about 18 months. It cost approximately $50 million to rebuild.”
This visualisation shows extremes of the water cycle – droughts and pluvials – over a twenty-year period (2002-2021) based on observations from the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites. Dry events are shown as red spheres and wet events as blue spheres, with earlier years being shown as lighter shades and later years as darker shades. The volume of the sphere is proportional to the intensity of the event, a quantity measured in cubic kilometre months. Video: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Investing in climate resilience
To address the issue of a changing climate and improve the resilience of countries’ infrastructure, investment is needed.
OECD data reveals an increase in climate-significant public investment from regional and local governments.
New developments present an opportunity to build the ethos of climate resilience into projects from the outset, improving the cost viability of those projects and decreasing the need to maintain and retrofit existing assets.
The below chart depicts the climate-significant investment by level of government in OECD countries, in AUD PPP per capita (real terms).
Investment by local government is marked in navy, state government in grey and central government in teal.
Nilsen said Aurecon’s philosophy is to guide its clients to better understand the risk “to the whole business chain”.
“It’s not about necessarily trying to reduce the capital cost of an asset to the absolute minimum,” he said. “If a facility is knocked out, the costs that mount up can be millions of dollars per day. And if a facility is inactive for an entire year, the resultant cost is enormous compared to the cost of giving yourself a bit of freeboard and protecting yourself against that sort of event.”
That kind of forward thinking was exemplified during a restoration of the Hay Point Terminal in Mackay, the metallurgical coal-loading terminal for five Bowen Basin mines in Queensland.
Aurecon stepped in to renew the existing berth and replace one of the shiploaders.
“We essentially conducted reconstruction of the facility,” Nilsen said, “lifting it some four or five metres higher and ballasting it down so the whole thing didn’t slide on the seabed under large cyclone waves.”
As a result, the team extended the asset’s life by 50 years and avoided new development impacting the nearby Great Barrier Reef.
Explore how engineers are grappling with resilience in the built environment at Engineers Australia’s Climate Smart Engineering (CSE) 2025 conference in Adelaide from 27-28 August.
Sources
OECD (2024), Infrastructure for a Climate-Resilient Future, OECD Publishing, Paris
OECD (2024), G20/OECD report on approaches for financing and investment in climate-resilient infrastructure
OECD (2022), Subnational Government Climate Hub
NASA (2025), NASA GRACE / GWI, Rodell and Li via The Guardian
Part of this story is an adaptation of an original work by the OECD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed in this adaptation should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its Member countries.
Further reading
