Julie Rozenberg

Infrastructure--electricity, telecommunications, roads, water, and sanitation--are central to people's lives. Without it, they cannot make a living, stay healthy, and maintain a good quality of life. Access to basic infrastructure is also a key driver of economic development. This report lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience - the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users' needs during and after a natural hazard. It focuses on four infrastructure systems that are essential to economic activity and people's well-being: power systems, including the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity; water and sanitation--especially water utilities; transport systems--multiple modes such as road, rail, waterway, and airports, and multiple scales, including urban transit and rural access; and telecommunications, including telephone and Internet connections.

Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015." Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight ofpoor people.This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to wellbeing than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities.As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together.

This report focuses on the decarbonization aspects of green growth, looking at the planning instruments, policy mix, and financial structure that can help deliver what is needed to keep warming as close as possible to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.