Embedding economics into Phase 2 of the Climate Resilience Demonstrator digital twin can help in supporting decision makers when making resilience investments

Frontier Economics was commissioned by Connected Places Catapult (CPC) for a second phase evaluation to identify the expected impacts of the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) and provide a simulation of potential social benefits related to flood resilience.

Frontier’s study, published today, contributes to the development of CReDo as a decision-support tool by identifying cross-network interdependencies and where coordinated investments across infrastructure asset operators can achieve a given level of resilience at lower cost. This study builds on the work we have done last year on the first phase of CReDo, around the development of a logic model and theory of change of CReDo and the simulation of some of the potential benefits.

In this second phase, CReDo has developed to better reflect realities facing asset operators. For example, real asset data was used to characterise the current resilience properties of their networks. We applied the economic evaluation methodology we developed for the first phase and compared the potential net benefits of different resilience strategies, from both an individual operator perspective and a system perspective.

One of the key outputs from this phase of work is the CReDo measure of ‘asset criticality’, from both perspectives. This measure illustrates where and how a connected approach is likely to add value when making strategic investment decisions, compared to a world where asset operators make those decisions independently of one another. Other outputs from this phase include identifying the pathways of cascading asset outages and the budget impact of resilience investments. To demonstrate the current decision-support functionality of CReDo, we simulated a case study flood scenario in East England.

CReDo is a pioneering climate change adaptation digital twin project aimed at improving resilience across infrastructure networks, providing a practical example of how connected data and greater access to the right information can improve climate adaptation and resilience. It brings together asset datasets, flood datasets, asset failure models and a system impact model to provide insights into infrastructure interdependencies and how they would be impacted under future climate change flooding scenarios, enabling asset operators, regulators and policymakers to collaborate using the CReDo digital twin to make better decisions which maximise resilience across the infrastructure system. CReDo was also recently awarded Ofwat’s Innovation Fund.

Click here to read the full report.

For more information, please contact media@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.