Community & Infrastructure Resilience

The Time for Community and Infrastructure Resilience is Now

Climate shocks and stressors threaten many places where we live, work, and play. As communities grow and critical infrastructure ages, governments, businesses, and community leaders must incorporate resilient planning and design to adapt. Identifying actionable investments requires data-driven planning frameworks that are:

Adaptive: Accommodate system-wide changes before, during, and after disruptive events.

Probabilistic: Acknowledge destructive events and future conditions that are likely to occur. This includes accounting for localized hazards throughout the expected life cycle of programs and projects.

Phased: Consider the path to implementing solutions. Setting a baseline to understand the criticality of intervention may allow for strategic changes to take place over time.

Locally Informed: Look at existing conditions and establish a collective vision through community outreach and stakeholder engagement. The project team should also include local representatives.

Holistic: Engage members of the community and a spectrum of experts across different disciplines. This allows for the identification and prioritization of other critical considerations. For instance, the data may demonstrate a need to prioritize equity or environmental justice in parallel with resilience to better align with a program’s goals.

Sustainable: Provide clear direction. The leadership of public and private entities may change over time. For projects to create a lasting imprint on the community, it is critical to understand not only the need for investment, but also mechanisms to secure project funding.

Kimley-Horn’s engineers, planners, landscape architects, and environmental scientists understand how to develop actionable resilience programs and incorporate resilient design principles when preparing community and master planning documents, engineering plans and reports, landscape designs, and developing new data analysis tools to help communities solve problems. We seek to equip decision makers with the tools they need to be well-informed. Our portfolio of work spans municipal planning, infrastructure development, project design, and program management. That’s why we’ve been at the forefront of assisting public and private sector clients in preparing for an uncertain future.