News about extreme weather events has become a monthly occurrence, highlighting the importance of embedding some measure of infrastructure and societal resilience in the evolving climate.

Damage to the built and natural environments disrupts socioeconomic activity, but the general public, naturally, tends to focus on visibly dramatic and/or traumatic events, often ignoring the more understated impacts of climate change.

For example, while most people know about the wildfires that affected Europe last month, far fewer are aware that France had trouble cooling some of its nuclear reactors because the record-breaking heatwave meant that the rivers were too warm.

As reported by news agency Reuters on July 15, four of the nuclear power plants operated by Electricite de France had to impose production restrictions because of higher-than-expected water temperatures in and along the Rhône and Garonne rivers.

Reuters also reported the potential of further impacts on electricity production, as “some coal-to-power stations also need cooling water from rivers”.

Moreover, while drought can often invoke visions of queues at water tankers and failing crops, the impact on sewage infrastructure is rarely considered.

During the launch of the book Towards the Blue-Green City: Building Urban Water Resilience in June, co-author and University of the Western Cape Institute for Water Studies’ Professor Jenny Day noted that “less water flowing in sewers [means that] the sewers are more vulnerable to blockages and, therefore, to overflows”.

Further, as people flush toilets less frequently to conserve water, the amount of sewage reaching wastewater treatment plants decreases, creating a “vicious cycle of failing wastewater treatment plants, [even] less water available, and less effluent, which could’ve perhaps been recycled”.

Both examples illustrate that the effects of climate change can be much more subtle than physical destruction and, as international organisation the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) notes, the interconnected nature of infrastructure systems means that significant disruption in one aspect can “exert a significant human toll”.

GCA CEO Patrick Verkooijen notes that “every corporation and individual is vulnerable to climate risk because they all depend, to some degree, on infrastructure. Ensuring that these infrastructure systems can operate under future climate scenarios is vital for us and our economies”.

He adds that the cost of infrastructure damage will increase exponentially by 2050. Citing Ghana as an example, he notes that climate risk could lead to $3.9-billion worth of damage to the transport sector by 2050. This would, in addition to strangling the Ghanaian economy, risk cutting off 80% of the population from access to healthcare.

The costs of extreme weather events are escalating. The floods experienced in KwaZulu-Natal earlier this year killed more than 400 people, immobilised business activity in parts of the province and caused considerable infrastructure damage, with Parliament’s Ad Hoc Joint Committee on Flood Disaster Relief and Recovery estimating that repairs would cost at least R17-billion.

It is, therefore, evident that infrastructure resilience is key to long-term sustainability because, as Deloitte Africa Climate and Sustainability leader Mark Victor notes, resilient systems improve the ability of a society to withstand shocks.

Creating infrastructure resilience requires that local governments understand the current and future impact of climate change on the built and natural environment, and all the potential implications of climate risks. They should also model the risk impacts and use such models to create a comprehensive and strategic plan to help drive resilience, he explains.

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) senior researcher Willemien van Niekerk notes that, while the CSIR and other entities have been collecting and interpreting data to assist government in developing climate-res...