The focus of this outcome will be to address the bottlenecks of SIDS infrastructure planning, design, delivery, operations, maintenance and decommissioning for increasing the resilience of SIDS infrastructure to climate change and disaster risks. It will also include investing in institutional and policy frameworks. IRIS will not invest in the construction of any infrastructure assets directly, but it will ensure that assets are built, managed, and maintained to be resilient to a level that appropriately reflects the climate risks, design life and importance, and wherever possible, promote further community resilience. IRIS will promote the good practices of enhancing infrastructure resilience, for example, comprehensive risk and resilience assessments that include risks to the assets, services and people who will access them, disaster risk reduction through establishing risk management strategies etc. This outcome will be focused on providing technical support, ranging from strategic prioritization and project development and design to implementation, maintenance, and monitoring across multiple infrastructure sectors. It will also focus on handholding SIDS to access funding and investment opportunities that support long term commitments for infrastructure resilience and facilitating the use of climate and disaster risk data for informed decision-making. Given that disaster recovery provides a window of opportunities for building back better, the idea of resilient infrastructure is critical and applicable to the post-disaster context as well. In this context, IRIS can support SIDS through post-disaster assessments of critical infrastructure sectors to support recovery and reconstruction.
The priority will be to strengthen institutional and regulatory frameworks for policy, planning, execution, operation, regulation, and maintenance to increase the resilience of infrastructure against the disaster and climate-induced risks in SIDS. This will include providing technical support to develop risk and resilience policies and strategies, infrastructure standards and building codes, disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation plans for infrastructure development, undertaking risk and resilience assessments and post-disaster assessments of critical infrastructure sectors to support recovery and reconstruction. Technical support will be provided through facilitating the use of climate and disaster risk data for informed decision-making for infrastructure policy, financing, planning, and management.
The priority will be to identify and strengthen mechanisms, tools, frameworks and approaches required to implement an integrated disaster risk reduction strategy that builds infrastructure resilience. This will include providing support for Business Continuity Planning (BCP) to stakeholders engaged in infrastructure provisioning in SIDS. Under this strategic priority the focus will be on strengthening implementing mechanisms for realising resilient infrastructure.
The priority will be to handhold SIDS to access innovative finance mechanisms, funding and investment opportunities that support long-term commitments for infrastructure resilience. The focus will be to empower SIDS to access, mobilize and use new and existing resources from international funds. This will not only enhance the island states’ capacity to access technical expertise and funding for resilient infrastructure but also ensure complementarity with other initiatives in the region.