Guide
A Composite Methodology for Investing in Climate and Disaster Resilient Local Infrastructure Systems
Andrew Maskrey
Consultant to UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub
Local infrastructure systems and the SDG
Local disaster and climate resilient infrastructure systems refer to infrastructure that provides essential services to individuals, households, communities, and businesses, and includes water, drainage, sanitation networks, local road, river, and rail networks, health and education facilities, post-harvest processing and storage facilities etc.
Investments in resilient local infrastructure systems support good health and wellbeing (SDG 3), quality education (SDG 4), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), affordable clean energy (SDG 7), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11), and climate action (SDG 13).
Most damage to local infrastructure systems is associated with extensive risk
Proportion of damage associated with intensive and extensive risk in local infrastructure systems: Source: Based on data from 65 countries between 1990 and 2013 and published in GAR15
Example: Road sector in Cambodia
The Composite Methodology
“Help prioritise investments for local infrastructure systems through providing analysis and findings that are actionable by local governments to make their local infrastructure disaster and climate resilient and achieve relevant SDGs.
The methodology’s primary audience is planners and decision makers in local government departments that determine public infrastructure investment priorities”.
Components of the Composite Methodology
- Components 1 – 3 are intended to provide comparative analysis, enabling local governments to rank their subdistricts in terms of their infrastructure gaps, the extensive risk to their infrastructure, and a normalised combination of the two.
- Components 4 – 5 can be used to estimate the order of magnitude of the investment required for climate and disaster resilient local infrastructure systems that contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.
Data sources
Official statistical data on population, territory, and coverage of essential services in each Regency; and
Disaster loss and damage data for each Regency for the period 1991-2021 (30 years of data) from the Indonesian Disaster Information and Data (DIBI)
Component 1
Infrastructure gap in Gorontalo and Jawa Barat Provinces
The maps show the gap in access to essential services in each Regency in Jawa Barat and Gorontalo Provinces. For access to health infrastructure (i.e. hospital beds), the standard applied is that of 18 hospital beds per 100,000 population, which was used as a threshold, with the percentage score calculated in those Regencies that had less than 18 or more beds per 100,000 population. In the case of roads, it is assumed that paved roads are required to provide all-weather transport and access. Other essential services considered were available electricity and piped water.
Figure 3: Map of infrastructure gap in each Regency
Component 2
Climate Hazard density in Gorontalo and Jawa Barat Provinces
Component 3
Climate and disaster resilient infrastructure index
The maps show the composite ‘Climate and disaster resilient infrastructure indicator’ for each Regency. To calculate this indicator both the ‘Infrastructure gap indicator’ and the ‘Climate hazard density indicator’ were given an equal weighting. This weighting is ultimately arbitrary and should be determined in each country. Other weightings could be used, depending on the relative priority given to addressing the infrastructure gap and strengthening climate resilience.
Figure 9: Map of ‘Climate and disaster resilient infrastructure indicator’ for each Regency
Component 4
Component 5
Order of magnitude estimate for the cost of disaster resilient infrastructure
Costs were calculated using the following per capita unit costs as inputs based on SDG 3, SDG 6, and SDG 7:
- Cost to provide electricity per capita: $1,547
- Cost to provide piped water per capita: $20
- Cost to provide beds per capita: $58
- Cost to pave roads per km: $101,233 (using unit costs for West Java Province)
Figure 13: Map of total investment in climate and disaster resilient infrastructure required for each Regency to meet SDGs 3, 6, and 7
Some conclusions
- The Composite Methodology can be used to estimate the order of magnitude of the investment required for climate and disaster resilient local infrastructure systems that contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.
- These are initial order of magnitude estimates, that serve as the first step of analysis for local governments to understand the scale of investments necessary before embarking on detailed planning that can translate these initial results into viable public investment projects, based on site-specific characteristics and costings, detailed hazard information, and other context-specific information.
- The methodology has also been kept as simple as possible with the intention that it can be applied in contexts with limited data and technical capacities. Although many aspects of the methodology could of course be enhanced with additional data and more sophisticated approaches, this would reduce its applicability.