Climate resilient infrastructure systems: improving science-policy-practice collaboration

In: Climate change 2022, 51

In: Ressortforschungsplan of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection

Abstract

Over the course of 2021, UBA commissioned a series of workshops on the topic of climate resilient infrastructure systems to discuss why research outputs are not more consistently transferred into practice of infrastructure operation. This paper presents the outcomes of this process. It presents barriers for successful transfer of research outputs into practice and for each barrier provides recommendations to overcome them. The identified key lessons for facilitating climate resilience of infrastructure systems are: (i) A better approach to knowledge co-production is needed at all stages of research, including the explicit inclusion of a trust-building phase between researchers and users; (ii) Frameworks related to funding, standards, and regulations need to be systematically assessed to determine whether and why they might facilitate or hinder the uptake of research results; (iii) Existing capacity to raise Technology Readiness Levels needs to be increased, e.g., by providing funding programs that support long-term collaboration among successful consortia; (iv) There is a need for European and national services to support long-term access to research results; (v) More capacity needs to be provided for education and training of users; (vi) There is a need for improved cross-sector applicability through harmonization of methods, data formats, and terminology; and (vii) A mechanism is needed to support the extension of already well-established (but potentially sector-specific) research results for critical infrastructure systems. The target audiences for these recommendations are funding bodies, policy makers, and standardization bodies that can influence the framework conditions under which infrastructure resilience research takes place, research project coordinators and other academic/researcher institutions who are often the main responsible for the design of research projects, and practitioners who design and manage (critical) infrastructure systems.