We do not lack evidence, so why is resilience still losing?

Melanie Manton, Global Business Development Manager, BREEAM Infrastructure, BRE

A single heatwave can cost the UK more than £1bn. The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) estimates that the June 2026 heatwave alone cost 24 million lost working hours and £1.15bn. In its paper Making resilience count, ICE concludes that the UK underinvests in resilience because the actions that deliver it are "not measured or rewarded commensurate with their value".

That sentence describes most infrastructure budget meetings I have sat in. As ICE puts it, "measured against money, an averted disaster is an absence." When a resilience measure competes for funding against a visible saving today, it loses, and the cost of that decision arrives years later as a repair bill or a closed carriageway. When a road or railway closes, the people who depend on it lose access to work and services long before anyone asks about the condition of the asset.
 

What 20 years of assessments show

BREEAM Infrastructure began as CEEQUAL, the scheme initiated by ICE in 2003. Across certified assessments of roads, rail, flood defence and utilities since then, we have seen that knowledge is rarely the weak point. We know more than ever about the risks infrastructure faces.

The weak point is how we value resilience, because success is invisible until disruption occurs. Requirements that are clear in the business case fade by the time the contract is tendered. Organisations set ambitious resilience goals at corporate level, then watch project decisions dilute them, and nobody is accountable for the gap.

The panellists at our ICE Resilient Transport session in Manchester, UK, agreed. The challenge is no longer understanding resilience. The challenge is valuing and explaining it early enough to influence the decisions that matter most.

Every infrastructure scheme passes through three stages. Strategy decides which option goes ahead, design turns the option into drawings and specifications, and construction builds it. A resilience decision costs least while the scheme is still on paper and most after a flood or heatwave.

The Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme in Northern Ireland shows the value of making resilience decisions early. In 2018, three years before construction began, the Department for Infrastructure applied Northern Ireland's new climate change allowances during outline design. This raised the design flood levels and increased the length, height and cost of the defences. The defences were also designed to be raised as sea levels rise, allowing the city to adapt beyond 2117 without replacing them. At that stage, the change required only a design revision. During construction, it would have meant altering defences that were already being built.

The same holds for the network we already have. The UK's National Infrastructure Commission estimates that 85% of today's rail assets could still be in place in 2055, so much of the network's future resilience will come from maintenance decisions. In Scotland, the team that maintains the A83 trunk road built landslide defences at the Rest and Be Thankful, a mountain pass often closed by landslides, and reused the excavated rock at a nearby site. That is a resilience decision made inside a maintenance budget. BREEAM Infrastructure Term Contracts assesses this kind of maintenance and renewal work.
 

Why assessment changes the decision

ICE says resilience is not measured. On a BREEAM Infrastructure assessment, it is. The assessor checks that climate risks reflect current projections, that the design responds to them, and that evidence is provided at each stage.

When the assessment starts matters too. Many schemes are assessed only during construction, when the design is fixed and the assessor can check only how it is built. Belfast was assessed as a whole project under CEEQUAL and rated Excellent, so its assessment covered the design stage, when decisions like the 2018 one are still open.

A certificate is not a valuation. It cannot tell a business case what a flood defence is worth. It can show, with independent evidence, that the risk was assessed and the design changed because of it.

ICE is calling for a UK-wide review of how we value adaptation, and we will share our assessment records as part of this review. Those records show what was designed and built, not how assets have performed since.

The industry already accepts that resilience matters. Once it values resilience early, a harder question follows: if the funding arrived tomorrow, would we have the skills and capacity to deliver resilient infrastructure at scale?

To discuss how an assessment could support your next scheme, contact breeaminfrastructure@bregroup.com.