As many countries prioritise investments in infrastructure – across energy, transport, digital, flood defences and water systems – the task of making sound, long-term predictions about the future is becoming harder and harder.
This, in turn, is making investment decision-making more complex than ever. There’s a clear and growing need to avoid “lock-in” to solutions that may ultimately fail to deliver a safe, low carbon, nature positive and regenerative future. Adaptive planning – which produces adaptation pathways – is a means of tackling this challenge.
When infrastructure designers focus on resilience, there are core principles that are universal across all forms of infrastructure: flexibility, responsiveness, robustness, redundancy, diversity, coordination and information. To overcome this considerable complexity (and the hesitancy it can cause), designers and engineers now develop solutions with adaptation pathways embedded within the form and implementation of a scheme or programme.
This is a methodology that acknowledges that things do not always turn out as anticipated. Instead, by planning a for a range of foreseeable futures, it provides decision-makers with far greater flexibility than traditional planning methods. The outcome from an adaptive planning process is usually an adaptation pathway, including multiple sequences of actions, with alternative routes, path dependencies and lock-in risks, providing a route through decisions over time.
Adaptation pathways anticipate and define changing circumstances, emergent risks and new priorities. Fundamentally, this is a highly practical decision-making framework that helps organisations to:
• Build clear, defensible investment cases
• Phase their investments or spending over time
• Maintain flexibility when new realities or priorities emerge
• Reduce wasted or unwise investments in key infrastructure
