Resilience Optimisation of Urban Water-Related Infrastructures under Multi-Risk Scenarios

Urban water management highly relies on a large number of related technical infrastructures. However, urban water management faces a severe challenge due to climate extremes' increased frequency and severity. Recent phenomena, such as droughts, heatwaves, storms, rising aquifers, or sea level rise, threaten the balance of water resources and cause potentially a functional degradation of water-related infrastructures. To understand how to act, more and more researchers suggest understanding the resilience mechanisms of these infrastructures. Unlike the concept of "vulnerability", which focuses on protecting infrastructure from hazards, "resilience" considers mainly the recovery of infrastructure functionality. It accepts hazards and transforms them into non-risk factors.

Even though “resilience” today in the literature has a wide range of meanings, studies on the resilience of infrastructures aim to the development of more effective and sustainable actions for the cities under risk. The choice of possible actions for optimising resilience is varied and multidimensional. In applying a case study in Lyon, France, this study aims to identify potential actions for improving the resilience of urban water infrastructures under multi-risk scenarios. Among the related theories and methods, the “Behind the Barriers” model is chosen as the foundation of this study. This model is considered a theory that allows effective and comprehensive analysis of urban infrastructure resilience. In the model, urban systems are conceptualised as complex systems, and long-term impacts and connections with the external environment are considered to overcome the barriers of temporal, geographic, and dimensional limits. The results show that, under different risk scenarios, the resilience of water-related infrastructures could be optimised by improving cognitive, functional, correlative, and organisational capacities.