Infraprotect from climate shocks

India is in the process of building the infrastructure it requires. The bulk of this will be built in the current decade at a time when the impacts of climate change are becoming more visible, intense and frequent. A climate-constrained world is the context in which the developing world will build its infra, while the developed world will have to retrofit. The infrastructure being built today will have to be qualitatively different from that built before - it has to be resilient to climate shocks and disasters.

Ensuring that countries have the capacity to factor in the risk that disasters and climate-change impacts pose to infrastructure requires economies working together and finding solutions that work. The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), launched by India in September 2019 and promoted since, is a response to bridge the capacity-solutions gap. CDRI is a multi-stakeholder global partnership focusing on opportunities and challenges to build climate and disaster resilience in transitioning infrastructure systems. On Wednesday, Narendra Modi underlined this in a pre-recorded message at the CDRI's international conference in New Delhi.

Infrastructure is not just about creating assets but about providing people quality service in an equitable manner. Two issues should be at the core of any infrastructure development - how to ensure systems are resilient to climate shocks, and how infra systems can provide sustainable solutions in a dependable fashion to people. For India, CDRI is also about leveraging its capacities to provide support to other countries through systems like the Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS) that was launched in partnership with Britain at COP26 in Glasgow last year.