Event Summary
Organization: University of Oxford
Description
Date: Monday, May 14, 4:00pm – 6:00pm
Room: Salon de los Maestros
Rapidly growing countries in Africa and Asia will need to invest billions in new infrastructure over the next decades to provide universal access to basic needs and support development. Many of these infrastructure assets will last for decades and will be exposed to increasing natural hazards that can threaten their reliability and result in very significant damage if a hazard occurs. Incorporating resilience in the design of new infrastructure, and effectively reducing risk to existing infrastructure, requires an actionable understanding of the infrastructure networks, localized disaster risk and the effectiveness of a range of interventions. Though detailed risk analysis is possible in principle, it is usually thwarted by difficulties of obtaining information on hazards, networks and network usage.
Big data sources, from OpenStreetMap and mobile phones, are revolutionizing global infrastructure datasets. Whilst models and datasets are becoming faster, more detailed and more comprehensive, the step from modelling to decision making is not at all straightforward. This is, among other reasons, due to the complexity of infrastructure networks and because interdependencies between different types of networks are often not taken into account. Open data, reducing the complexity of the models and bringing all stakeholders together can significantly support the understanding and consequently the decision making process how to make infrastructure more resilient.
This session brings together the state-of-the-art on infrastructure network understanding, risk modelling, and decision-making methods, to answer three questions. First, what are the opportunities of open access data sources and which data requirements are still unable to fulfill? How do we deal with data gaps and incomplete information? Second, how do we use data and information to prioritize investments given the many needs, the uncertainty pertaining to the future performance of different technologies, and limited budgets? Third, how do we present and communicate results from infrastructure risk models, including uncertainties and trade-offs, in a way that can be understood and acted upon by non-experts?
There will be two outputs for this session. The first output will be a short review of data needs and opportunities, based on an interactive discussion with participants. The second output of the session will be a ‘vision’ for the understanding of infrastructure risk policy tools and how these tools should be developed to maximize its use for infrastructure investment decision making. Session participants will be expected to interactively participate in this process and voice their opinions throughout. Both outputs will be published through the Worldbank channels as a Policy Brief/blog post.