What Are the Best Infrastructure Investments to Make? Is It Based on Economics, or Resilience, or Both?

The following article was recently published in Engineering - an international open-access journal produced by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. 

BY David Singleton AM.

Our infrastructure investment decisions matter enormously if infrastructure is to be long lived, so how can we select infrastructure investments that are optimum? How do we determine what would be the best investments to make?

Projects are generally selected on economic grounds, but they should also be meeting “other criteria” including the ability of the infrastructure to restore, regenerate and increase social, cultural, natural and economic capital.

This “other criteria” is the focus of work being undertaken by the Infrastructure Sustainability Council of Australia (ISCA), who in 2018 will launch version 2.0 of the IS Rating Scheme (ISv2.0), which provides a basis for planning of infrastructure–not only how it rates from a sustainability point of view, but also provides input into how we should best plan, design and operate this piece of infrastructure.

Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2018.04.001 

This article was based on an original article co-written for the Conversation, by Cynthia Mitchell, Professor of Sustainability, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney; David Singleton, Chair, Smart Cities Research Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, and Jim Bentley, Honorary Director, Centre for Infrastructure Research, University of Auckland.