Welcome to the latest edition of the IRM Infrastructure Group newsletter
A very warm welcome to our latest edition of the Infrastructure Special Interest Group Newsletter. It’s been a little while since our last Newsletter, and we’ve packed quite a lot into this one, which we hope you find of interest and value. We are excited to share news and perspectives about Infrastructure happening around the world and highlight our events.
I have recently been handed the baton of the Group Chair role from Danielle Mudd and Wes Cadby, who established this Group and who have done such a good job with it. On behalf of all our Group members, I would like to express the gratitude for all the work they have done and their continued support. I would also like to express my gratitude to Gareth Byatt who continues to act as Editor in Chief for our Newsletter. I look forward to our continued activities as an Infrastructure Group to share and support each other.
Regards, Chair of Infrastructure Group: Yukitaka Matsuda, MBA, MSc.
Chancellor to change debt rules to release billions
The government will change its self-imposed debt rules in order to free up billions for infrastructure spending, the chancellor has told the BBC. Rachel Reeves said that she would make a technical change to the way debt is measured which will allow it to fund extra investment.
The UK government has announced the creation of a National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (“NISTA”) to tackle long-standing issues in the country’s infrastructure development. This new body is aimed at addressing delays and inefficiencies that have marred the UK’s global reputation with investors. By unifying strategy and delivery, NISTA seeks to restore investor confidence and fuel economic growth through a comprehensive ten-year infrastructure strategy. This article explores the challenges addressed by NISTA, its anticipated benefits for the infrastructure industry and the broader implications for contractors and employers.
The first new Piccadilly line test train arrived in London on 16th October, before the fleet enters service. These new trains will start operations by the end of 2025. PLU (Piccadilly Line Upgrade) is the largest current Capital Programme for Transport for London (TfL), to provide new trains and associated infrastructure to modernise the line. The upgrade is spilt into two stages; Stage 1 is a £3bn programme that will provide a new fleet of air-cooled modern trains and enabling works to improve reliability, efficiency, and accessibility. Stage 2 is a full upgrade of its signalling system to a modern digital network.
Cambridge Electric Cement raises £2.25m to industrialise low carbon, circular cement production
University of Cambridge spin-out Cambridge Electric Cement (CEC) raises £2.25m seed funding round to industrialise low carbon, circular cement production.
14 building materials shaping the future of the built environment
Through innovations in energy efficiency, resource usage and insulation, the built environment is hard at work to reduce the amount of operational carbon – the emissions resulting from an asset’s usage post-construction – created by buildings and infrastructure…
“Infrastructure is fundamentally about making people’s lives better”
During FIDIC’s Global Infrastructure Conference in Geneva in September 2024, His Excellency Mohamed Ali Al Shorafa, chairman of the Department of Municipalities and Transport in Abu Dhabi, spoke to Infrastructure Global about the major investments being made that will significantly enhance the emirate’s infrastructure and quality of life.
A perspective on infrastructure’s role in supporting disaster resilience, by Gareth Byatt (IRM Infrastructure Group Committee member)
Part of my work is in disaster risk reduction and disaster resilience. This includes supporting the UN agency responsible for disaster risk reduction (UNDRR).
Most recently, I have been delighted to be a contributing author to the UNDRR’s annual flagship report for 2024, the Global Assessment Report (GAR) Special Report 2024. Amongst the points discussed in this report and its findings is the criticality of providing resilient infrastructure to help and support countries around the world in their resilience against disaster hazards.
In the words of the current Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Head of UNDRR, Kamal Kishore:
"As much of the infrastructure needed to support our growing human population has yet to be built, we owe it to future generations to leverage every opportunity to inject resilience into our investments. This starts with understanding the past to build a more resilient future."
In November 2023, I interviewed theformer Head of UNDRR, Ms Mami Mizutori,about UNDRR's work and future needs for ensuring disaster resilience. The criticality of infrastructure was a central part of the interview.
Disaster resilient infrastructure is a critical matter for our time
A key area of focus for ensuring resilient infrastructure as we move forwards is to ensure we are thinking clearly about our needs. This means thinking more holistically than building large structures; it requires a systems approach and rounded thinking.
For example, here is a viewpoint about flood management structures.
This example is part of an initiative that I am working on with Professor Ilan Kelman and Ana Prados called Disasters Avoided. We have created a model with six factors that we commonly see when good work is undertaken to avoid disasters. These factors apply to all sorts of decisions and activities, including the provision of infrastructure:
The right mindset - invest upfront, don’t wait for an event
The right investment / funding - the right amount, the right benefits
Good governance - well-informed + enforced
Good data - from various sources + a collective effort
Meaningful inclusion - act together (some decisions are hard)
Meaningful targets - agree what to strive for
You can find out more about the Disasters Avoided Model here.
The UNDRR global methodology for infrastructure resilience
This methodology, developed by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), aims to support countries in assessing the current state of infrastructure resilience, so that areas of improvement are identified, and actions taken.
The integration of cyber resilience within energy projects forming the UK’s critical national infrastructure
By Rob Chapman
A brief review
A review of the Featured Paper contained in the online PM World Journal ,Volume XIII, Issue VI – June 2024 titled: Integration of cyber resilience within energy projects forming the UK’s critical national infrastructure by the award-winning author Dr Robert Chapman.
In summary, the paper promotes the embedding of cyber resilience throughout each lifecycle stage of new Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) projects. So key questions that may arise from the title are What is the country’s CNI? Why is it important to the economy and our way of life? and Why should we be concerned about cyber resilience? Cyber resilience has been taxing the UK government for many years and reporting by the primary news channels has repeatedly brought major cyberattacks to our attention. What has brought the subject into sharp focus has been the cyberattacks by Russia on Ukraine’s CNI prior and during the conflict and by China infiltrating the U.S. and other countries CNI as part of its lie-in-wait strategy. This review includes extracts of the Paper.
The paper addresses the three questions highlighted as follows:
What is the country’s Critical National Infrastructure?
According to the UK Government’s National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), the country’s critical national infrastructure relates to those facilities, systems, sites, information, people, networks and processes, necessary for a country to function and upon which daily life depends. In the UK, the 13 national infrastructure sectors are listed in Table 1 below.
2. Why is the country’s Critical National Infrastructure important to the economy and our way of life? The very fabric of our society is dependent on our CNI. It is by definition, the infrastructure that the country relies on most. It underpins our daily lives from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed. The constituents of CNI are the most important systems in the UK today. They include providing safe drinking water, health services, transport, electricity and keeping the country connected to the internet. Disruptions to the power grid due to cyber-attacks could lead to widespread blackouts, affecting everything from hospitals to train services, Smart motorway signs, lighting, traffic lights and emergency services.
3. Why should we be concerned about cyber resilience?
According to the Cabinet Office, cyberattacks against the UK Government and CNI operators nationally have “grown in sophistication, complexity and severity”. In addition, due to the limited success of current cyber resilience initiatives, efforts have “not yet fundamentally altered the risk calculus of attackers who continue to successfully target the UK and its interests ”. Taking a broad perspective, malign actors have a range of motives for instigating cyberattacks against the UK, such as the theft of intellectual property; criminal, commercial, financial and political gain; and sabotage and disruption through disinformation. Unfortunately, attackers have developed capabilities that evade mitigations and increasingly sophisticated cyber tools. Related enablers have been commoditised in a growing cyber ‘industry’, and the lowering of barriers to entry for all types of malicious actors.
While cyber resilience has for a long time been considered an operational issue, unless cyber resilience is embedded in the design, specification, procurement and delivery of new CNI projects, vulnerabilities will persist, leaving the UK exposed.
Serious about Sustainability + Climate Corner
Can infrastructure support Nature-positive solutions?
Did you know that in November 2023 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched a playbook to ensure infrastructure works for people, and the planet.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a global agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, has mobilized both governments and businesses to conserve and restore natural ecosystems around the world. The infrastructure sector needs to play its part in this mission, and putting nature at the heart of the design offers a great way to help reach our goals.
Examples exist of the SDGs being applied to infrastructure projects through their sustainability strategies. For example, Gareth Byatt was recently back in Sydney, Australia, for a visit (a city where he lived for over a decade). The Sydney Metro is now running, and it has received positive feedback from travellers.
The Sydney Metro Sustainability Strategy 2017-2024 is available online, here.
World Energy Outlook 2024, by the IEA
The IEA's flagship World Energy Outlook, published every year, is a key global source of energy analysis and projections. It identifies and explores the biggest trends in energy demand and supply, as well as what they mean for energy security, emissions and economic development…
Climate change and decarbonisation objectives are driving governments and investors to consider clean energy investing. But do investments in clean energy make financial sense? This is the question that a series of joint publications by the International Energy Agency and Imperial College London have sought to answer.
Can the finance sector support sustainable infrastructure?
Are you aware of the movement to invest in sustainable infrastructure? For an example of this, watch a short introduction video from the specialist alternative asset manager Gresham House on Vimeo.
(note: the IRM is not affiliated with this organisation)
AI and infrastructure
AI and Risk Management - the next generation
Richard Bendall-Jones CFIRM - Principal Risk Engineer, nPlan
There’s been a lot of talk about AI in the last year or so, hasn’t there? I work in this domain, using data and AI to support project forecasting. For many years, this has been seen as an area of potential, but now we’re starting to see a growing number of case studies around the world of organisations using AI to support their infrastructure projects, which, in my opinion, is great to see.
While these technologies are not yet at the point of mass adoption, all these data points (sorry) are adding up. What this means is that organisations and individuals who are skilled in these areas are seen as increasingly at a competitive advantage. Owner organisations can assure their clients to a greater extent, service providers can recommend a greater variety of tools to their clients, and individuals can feel they’re doing their work in a smarter way, increasing the value they can add, as well as helping new entrants to the profession get better, faster.
But that doesn’t mean that AI will magically improve us all. There is a skillset that is required to get the most of these technologies. An example of this is ‘prompting’. If you’ve used ChatGPT or similar, you input some text to receive a response. And if the response isn’t what you want, you rephrase what you want to get the outcome you need. This process is key to getting the best out of these types of ‘generative’ technologies. I think it’s the most important skills development since Excel formulae!
All of this means that hopefully we can overcome the resource challenges we face in infrastructure, and are due to only increase as we deliver larger and more complex projects.
Traditional approaches to managing risk have fallen out of step with contemporary project environments. Previously, when projects could predominantly be described as clear or complicated [1], a blend of good practice, best practice, and expert judgment was sufficient for their delivery. However, as we increasingly encounter complex and chaotic project environments, traditional methods that assume linear relationships between cause and effect are proving less effective.
This is supported by the sobering statistic from Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg that ’91.5% of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both’ [2], and highlights the need to change our approach to one that embraces complex systems thinking.
Whilst this next exciting evolution of risk management is still in its infancy, the Institute of Risk Management’s Risk & Complexity SIG is soon to publish an accessible set of good practice guidelines aimed at equipping organisations and projects with the tools they need to thrive in complex and chaotic environments.
The publication will provide a practical approach to identifying and managing complexityrisk with a case study from the IRM Infrastructure SIG outlining how the process put forward can benefit major projects.
[1] Snowden, D. J. (2023). Cynefin Framework and its Practical Applications. The Cynefin Company.
[2] Flyvbjerg, B., & Gardner, D. (2023). How Big Things Get Done
Parting thought – right-sized transport infrastructure
A perspective by Gareth Byatt
I recently spent some time in Bordeaux, a vibrant city in southwest France. I have visited this city several times, and my visit in October 2024 was to support the Municipal team with their programme of activities for Resilience Month (“le mois de la resilience”), held during October.
Infrastructure for the future was part of the discussion. Is this an approach that cities around the world can adopt?
Any visitor to Bordeaux will surely have seen, and probably used, the city’s excellent tramway network. The trams in Bordeaux are an excellent part of the city’s transport infrastructure – widely used, clean, efficient, good value.
This got me thinking: could more cities introduce comprehensive tramway networks? Metros and subways continue to be built, which are usually a lot more expensive than tramways. Whilst metros and subways have their place, might tramways (and light rail also) be a good potential solution for certain urban areas – if a thorough system analysis supported it?
A look at different transit costs from the Transit Costs team, a group of researchers under the umbrella of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, provides some interesting analysis for consideration.
Our upcoming event
Infrastructure Group - AI + Human Expertise = The Future of Risk Management
Join us for an insightful event on AI in Infrastructure Project Risk Management. We will explore how AI, combined with human expertise, enables us to fully harness the power of project data—turning it into precise, actionable insights.
AI is no longer a futuristic concept; it is a powerful tool transforming how we work today. By analysing massive datasets from past and current projects, AI can predict potential delays, highlight hidden risks, and provide detailed risk profiles, allowing more informed decision-making. Rather than replacing human judgement, AI enhances it, freeing you to focus on what truly matters while the technology handles the heavy data lifting.
This event will demonstrate how AI can:
Unlock the potential of your project data: AI processes vast amounts of information to uncover patterns beyond human detection, offering accurate, data-driven predictions.
Resolve long-standing project challenges: By leveraging previously overlooked data, AI enables you to anticipate delays, prevent cost overruns, and address risks before they escalate.
Enhance your expertise: AI delivers insights from complex datasets, allowing you to focus on high-impact areas and make faster, better decisions.
Boost productivity: Automating complex data analysis gives you more time for strategic planning and high-level decisions.
Ensure project success: AI-driven predictions help optimise resources, avoid delays, and keep projects on track like never before.
Advance your career: Mastering AI technology positions you as a leader in the future of project risk management, enabling you to deliver better outcomes for your projects and teams.
Finally, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Richard and everyone who took part in the recent IRM Infrastructure Group event on the 7th of November. It was fantastic to see such strong interest, with approximately 250 registrations overall. Your involvement made it a truly insightful session.
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