Preparing for the unpredictable: Building resilient water and marine infrastructure

In Australia, the argument was less a single national return-period standard and more a hard lesson from the Millennium Drought. The case was made through lived system failure risk: storages falling to historically low levels, emergency restrictions, high social and economic cost, and the recognition that relying on the historic climate record was no longer adequate. 

That led to diversified portfolios: demand management, restrictions, recycling, desalination, interconnections, groundwater and operational changes. For events where a neat return period is not credible, scenario planning should be used, as well as real-options thinking and regret testing: What is the cost of being wrong, what options keep us open, and what investment buys time when the system moves outside the statistical record? 

It is central. Resilience is not just an engineering property; it is an institutional habit. Government sets the direction and risk appetite, utilities turn that into plans, projects and operating rules, and the community provides the legitimacy to spend money before the crisis is visible.  

Where long-term planning is weak, start small and concrete: define the critical service outcomes, identify the credible shocks, agree the first no-regrets actions and build a repeatable planning cycle. The worst position is to treat resilience as an inspirational word rather than a set of decisions about service, money, governance and trade-offs. 

Broadly, yes. Underground infrastructure is where adaptive design has limits. If a tunnel, trunk main, deep drainage asset or buried corridor is likely to be inaccessible, congested or prohibitively expensive to modify later, then the adaptive pathway is worth thinking through up front. That does not mean gold-plating everything.  

It means being more conservative about the hard-to-change elements: alignments, corridors, hydraulic capacity, structural durability, access, interfaces and allowances for future connection. The adaptive part may be in staging, controls, pumps, treatment or surface assets. But the buried civil geometry is often the one chance you get. 

The starting point is not a sophisticated resilience framework. It is reliable basics. Protect the source, reduce losses, keep treatment robust, maintain power and chemical supply, and make sure there is an operating model that can actually be sustained.  

In low-capacity settings the best resilience measures are often modular, maintainable and institutionally simple: leakage reduction, safe storage, backup power, simple monitoring, operator training, catchment protection, emergency water plans and staged upgrades. A technically elegant system that cannot be operated or funded is not resilient. The design has to match the institutional reality. 

The honest answer is that there is no painless balance. Keeping bills down by deferring resilience can be a false economy if the result is emergency response, service restrictions, environmental damage or rushed procurement later.  

The discipline is to separate three things: what is required for basic service and safety, what is justified by avoided future cost and what is merely desirable. Then phase the work, protect low-income customers through tariff and social policy, and be transparent that resilience is a service customers are paying for, not an engineering indulgence.

Yes, there has been a shift, although it is uneven. Governments and utilities are more willing to fund options, readiness and planning than they were twenty years ago, because recent droughts, floods, fires and supply-chain shocks have made the cost of waiting more visible.  

The better organisations are not trying to predict one future perfectly. They are funding design options, enabling works, approvals, land corridors, pilot trials and decision triggers so that they can move faster when a crisis becomes real. The weaker organisations still treat resilience as something to be justified only after failure. 

I would go after experience first, then use study to fill the gaps. A degree or certificate can help, but resilience becomes real on projects: asset vulnerability assessments, emergency planning, coastal adaptation, water security, renewables, community infrastructure, disaster recovery and capital planning.  

In Hawaii, look for practical work with utilities, local government, ports, airports, Defence, emergency management or community infrastructure groups. The useful profile is not “resilience enthusiast”; it is someone who can help a project team make better decisions under uncertainty. 

For Defence and Navy infrastructure, start with mission continuity, not with a generic sustainability checklist. What has to keep working during heat, flood, storm surge, power loss, cyber disruption, fuel constraint or supply-chain interruption? Then test the concept design against those failure modes.  

Common measures could include raised and floodable assets, redundant power and communications, protected fuel and water systems, corrosion-resistant marine structures, secure access, maintainable wharf and dry-dock systems, spare capacity in utilities and staged recovery plans. The question is not “is this asset strong?” but “what mission fails if this asset is unavailable, and how quickly can we recover?” 

They’re very relevant but won’t solve everything. Green roofs, permeable pavements, rain gardens, wetlands and blue-green corridors can reduce runoff, improve water quality, cool urban areas and provide amenity and habitat. Under climate change they become more valuable because they give multiple benefits from the same footprint.  

But they still need engineering discipline: design storms, overflow paths, maintenance, sediment control, plant selection, land availability and performance monitoring. Treat nature-based stormwater infrastructure as part of the drainage system, not as decorative landscaping.

The main trend is not one miracle material; it is better durability thinking across the whole system. We are seeing more use of high-performance and low-permeability concretes, supplementary cementitious materials, stainless or duplex reinforcement in selected locations, fibre-reinforced polymers, improved coatings, cathodic protection, corrosion inhibitors, better joint detailing, remote monitoring and more disciplined inspection regimes.  

In harsh marine environments, detailing and constructability matter as much as material selection. A good material used badly will still fail. 

The useful solutions are usually practical and local: leakage control, district metering, pressure management, simple chlorination, protected wells and intakes, rainwater harvesting, decentralised treatment where it can be maintained, solar pumping, small storage, wetland or lagoon-based treatment, and operator training.  

The common thread is affordability, maintainability and institutional fit. There is also a lot of value in planning the service standard honestly. A modest system that is operated every day is better than an advanced system that fails for lack of spares, power or trained operators. 

In austerity, do not spread money thinly across everything. Protect the assets and decisions that avoid irreversible failure. That means clear prioritisation: safety, public health, critical service continuity, assets with high consequence of failure and enabling works that keep future options open.  

It also means being honest about what can be deferred without creating a larger bill later. The cheapest decision this year is not always the lowest-cost decision for the community. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the hard part is making that visible before the failure occurs. 

Community sentiment is best addressed early, not after the engineering solution has already been chosen. For potable reuse, the technical case and the trust case must be developed together. People need to understand why the option is being considered, what risks are controlled, how the treatment barriers work, how independent regulation and monitoring operate and how it compares with alternatives such as desalination, restrictions or new dams.  

Avoid clever branding and be plain. This is highly treated water; it can be made safe. The community deserves time, evidence, demonstration and independent assurance before being asked to accept it.

Small councils can improve their chances by making the resilience case in a form that state and federal funding programs can act on. That means a clear problem definition, evidence of service risk, options analysis, staged scope, realistic cost estimate, co-benefits, readiness to proceed and a credible operating model.  

For places like Tenterfield, the argument could be more than “we need a WTP upgrade”. It could connect drought, bushfire, public health, regional economic resilience and avoided emergency response. Councils can also package projects so that they are fundable: separable stages, shovel-ready early works, planning approvals and a clear statement of what happens if funding is deferred again.