Elsevier

Futures

Volume 66, February 2015, Pages 13-24
Futures

Creating an ensemble of future strategies for national infrastructure provision

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.11.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • New methodology for developing long-term strategies for infrastructure provision.

  • Integrated strategy assessment takes place within a systems-of-systems framework.

  • Strategies have an explicit connection with policy-relevant commitments.

Abstract

Well managed, maintained and effective national infrastructure (NI) systems (i.e. energy, transport, water, waste, ICT) provide the backbone for economic growth and societal wellbeing. Traditionally, NI planning and implementation has been conducted in isolation, based upon fixed assumptions about the future. This fails to recognise both the long-term socio-economic, climate-related and technological challenges and uncertainties of the coming century and the growing interconnectivity between these individual infrastructure systems. Here we develop a methodology for generating a range of strategies for the provision of NI suitable for an integrated ‘system-of-systems’ assessment of NI's future management. To provide coherent links with policy choices, integrated strategies are developed at an aggregate level with a diversity of investment requirements, demand management techniques, and levels of environmental targets. To facilitate implementation within NI simulation models, the example strategies are constructed from sectoral sub-strategies focusing on changes in demand, capacity utilisation and capacity expansion. Further new strategies can be explored and the approach lends itself to an iterative analytical approach, potentially capturing a wide range of policy questions. It is illustrated using the future provision of Great Britain's transport infrastructure as a case study, and demonstrates how cross-sector strategies for infrastructure provision can be developed.

Introduction

A nation's economic prosperity and societal wellbeing relies on high-quality infrastructure, particularly those essential services and systems which transport key resources and enable global communications (i.e. energy, transport, water, waste and information and communication technologies (ICT)) (CST, 2009). Provision of resilient, effective national infrastructure (NI) systems has become a focus of many advanced economies (CST, 2009, HM Treasury, 2010, ICE, 2009, ICE, 2010, Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young, 2011a, Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young, 2011b, WEF, 2011), but such systems face a number of serious challenges: (i) an increased demand for infrastructure services from a growing and ageing population; (ii) significant investment requirements to counter the vulnerabilities, capacity limitations and supply insecurities associated with an ageing infrastructure system; (iii) the increasing complexity, diversification and interdependence of infrastructure networks; and (iv) a widespread desire to maintain and improve environmental standards, including decarbonisation across infrastructure sectors.

Overcoming these multiple challenges requires a long-term strategic view on infrastructure provision, especially given the long lifespan of many physical infrastructure assets (particularly in water, transport and energy), and the long lead-time necessary to effect change in these systems (Hall et al., 2013, Hall et al., 2014a, ICE, 2009, ICE, 2010). However, the feasibility of such long-term planning is, in turn, challenged by future uncertainties associated with demographic, economic, environmental and political changes, as well as uncertainties about the nature of technological change (Faber, Idenburg, & Wilting, 2007), all of which are likely to have a significant effect on the demands and requirements of NI systems. Lastly, there is a wide range of potential future strategies (i.e. choices) concerning the future provision of national infrastructure.

Historically, policies and decisions regarding individual infrastructure sectors have been made through complex systems of governance and often in isolation, with little regard for other interconnected infrastructures. Levels of investment in infrastructure have been influenced by the perceived political and economic importance of individual sectors, and such investments have fluctuated over time (Helm et al., 2009, Marshall, 2010). More recently, the importance of taking a long-term and cross-sectoral view of infrastructure provision has been more widely acknowledged in many countries. For example, within the British Government, Infrastructure UK was formed in December 2009 with the specific aim of ensuring a more harmonised long-term vision of infrastructure planning. It promotes a more integrated approach to NI through the development of a National Infrastructure Plan (HM Treasury, 2010, HM Treasury, 2011, HM Treasury, 2012), which identifies a broad strategy for meeting the country's infrastructure needs.

In the longer term, such a broad strategy could evolve in a number of different directions, particularly depending on certain policy choices, such as (i) how much investment is available, (ii) the government's level of commitment to mitigating climate change, and (iii) the impact of differing approaches to managing demand for those services that NI helps to deliver. Fig. 1 outlines an analytic process to test the long-term impact and effectiveness of a range of infrastructure provision strategies across a wide range of socio-economic changes, and hence promote more effective decision-making and planning.

Modelling tools are used to simulate current and possible future configurations of the NI system for each sector and the possible interactions between interdependent sectors which have co-evolved spatially. Thus, a multi-sectoral integrative approach for a particular region is appropriate for this framework (Otto et al., 2014).

Exogenous input variables to these system models represent a range of scenarios of socio-economic and environmental change, while endogenous input variables are used to represent a diverse set of sector-specific strategies for infrastructure provision; these strategies also need to be combined to create plausible cross-sector strategies for the NI system as a whole.

This paper outlines the challenges of developing integrated strategies of future infrastructure provision across multiple interacting infrastructure sectors, and proposes and demonstrates a framework for their analysis. It is organised as follows. First, a brief background of traditional scenario studies is provided, with an explanation of how this has been adapted within a system-of-systems simulation model framework. This is followed by a more detailed presentation of how cross-sector strategies for infrastructure provision can be constructed. The approach is illustrated for NI in Great Britain (GB), with a detailed development of sector-specific strategies for transport, and their positioning within the cross-sector strategy framework. This is followed by discussion/conclusions.

Section snippets

Development of scenarios and strategies for use in a model framework

One of the traditional tools for assessing uncertain future developments in complex systems is scenario analysis. Both global and regional socio-economic and environmental scenario studies for integrated assessments such as those considered here tend to focus on how fundamental changes to the nature of populations, economies and governance regimes are likely to affect future changes in a particular performance metric of the system. Global Environmental Assessments (GEA), for instance, seek to

Overview of the model framework

The overall assessment framework incorporates a number of stages, as follows: (1) the generation of ensembles of future scenarios (i.e. plausible situations) of socio-economic and environmental conditions; (2) the generation of a range of interesting, distinct and plausible strategies for future NI provision; (3) the simulation of future demand and capacity in a suite of single-sector simulation models, linked to a central infrastructure database; and (4) the evaluation of infrastructure

Scenario generation

The first step of the modelling framework is to develop scenarios of future socio-economic and environmental change. At a national scale, population change and economic growth are the main drivers of change in demand for NI services (Hall, Henriques, Hickford, & Nicholls, 2012); the demand effects of these socio-economic drivers are modified by technological innovation and behavioural change. A range of futures comprising these socio-economic components can be assessed as part of the model

Strategy generation

The next step in the modelling framework is to develop a variety of sector-specific strategies for national infrastructure provision which can be assessed for the range of socio-economic and environmental scenarios. The ‘strategy’ aspect of the Explorative approach described above requires the development of a range of diverse sectoral and cross-sectoral, long-term national infrastructure provision strategies. A NI strategy comprises a series of system interventions through regulation,

Defining and combining sector-specific infrastructure provision strategies

A number of sector-specific infrastructure provision strategies have been developed which represent a menu of plausible options within each infrastructure sector. These strategies are constructed from combinations of sub-strategy components focused on changes in demand, infrastructure composition and supply as described above, spanning the range of policy dimensions shown in Fig. 2. The number of strategies for each sector has been deliberately limited to between five and ten. While this is

Discussion and conclusions

Integrated assessments have been applied widely to analyse complex social, economic, technical and environmental processes and their interactions (Kelly et al., 2013). However, while the different drivers have often been analysed in some detail, the potential effect of policy interventions has usually been treated in a rather simple caricaturised manner. This provides useful insights on the broad sensitivities to contrasting policy directions, but it does not allow the investigation of the more

Acknowledgments

All authors acknowledge funding of the work by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK) under Program Grant EP/I01344X/1 as part of the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC, www.itrc.org.uk). We also thank all ITRC colleagues for their continuing help in developing and adapting the approach to strategy generation presented in this paper.

References (58)

  • D.P. van Vuuren et al.

    Scenarios in global environmental assessments: Key characteristics and lessons for future use

    Global Environmental Change

    (2012)
  • D. Anthoff et al.

    The economic impact of substantial sea-level rise

    Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change

    (2010)
  • P. Baruah et al.

    Simulation of residential energy demand in Great Britain under a range of demographic change and energy system transition pathways

    Energy Policy

    (2014)
  • P. Bishop et al.

    The current state of scenario development: An overview of techniques

    Foresight – The Journal of Future Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy

    (2007)
  • S.P. Blainey et al.

    A long term capacity and demand assessment model for the UK transport system

  • S.P. Blainey et al.

    Planning transport networks for an uncertain future: a UK case study

  • Committee on Climate Change

    The fourth carbon budget – Reducing emissions through the 2020s

    (2010)
  • CST

    A national infrastructure for the 21st century

    (2009)
  • B. Égert et al.

    Infrastructure and growth: Empirical evidence

    (2009)
  • Foresight Futures

    Foresight Futures 2020 – Revised scenarios and guidance

    (2001)
  • E.M. Gramlich

    Infrastructure investment: A review essay

    Journal of Economic Literature

    (1994)
  • J.W. Hall et al.

    Systems-of-systems analysis of national infrastructure

    Proceedings of ICE – Engineering Sustainability

    (2013)
  • J.W. Hall et al.

    Assessing the long-term performance of cross-sectoral strategies for national infrastructure

    Journal of Infrastructure Systems

    (2014)
  • J.W. Hall et al.

    The future of national infrastructure: a system-of-systems approach

    (2014)
  • D. Helm et al.

    Delivering a 21st century infrastructure for Britain

    (2009)
  • N. Hill et al.

    SULTAN: Development of an illustrative scenarios tool for assessing potential impacts of measures on EU transport GHG

    (2010)
  • HM Treasury

    Infrastructure UK, National Infrastructure Plan 2010

    (2010)
  • HM Treasury

    Infrastructure UK, National Infrastructure Plan 2011

    (2011)
  • Cited by (24)

    • Evaluating the benefits of national adaptation to reduce climate risks and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals

      2022, Global Environmental Change
      Citation Excerpt :

      Here, we apply the formulation of strategies to national adaptation assessments, differentiating by built or nature-based strategies or alternative combinations of portfolios of adaptation options. The use of simulation models and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) as established in previous studies provides a useful means to assess various combinations of options to their performance across a set of metrics such as cost, carbon, implementation time, etc. (Hickford et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2020). Our proposed SDG target co-benefit metric – the total number of SDG targets that can potentially be influenced directly or indirectly by an adaptation strategy – can complement such evaluations.

    • How can virtuous real estate public-private partnerships be developed? Towards a co-evolutionary perspective

      2020, Cities
      Citation Excerpt :

      In other words, we argue, benchmarking the feasibility of PPPs in little towns with that in big cities should also reflect on how much the associated administrative bureaucracy of the two can be de facto compared; we would assume that the latter is, generally, physiologically more complex. Furthermore, this benchmark could be open to a parallel reflection on the potential dissimilarities among different local and national ecosystems, also in terms of laws and technical forms allowed for PPPs (Hickford et al., 2015). How much do these dissimilarities impact on the overall project development?

    • A systems-based assessment of Palestine's current and future infrastructure requirements

      2019, Journal of Environmental Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      Planning for future investments is made challenging by the technological, environmental, and socio-economic uncertainties inherent in long-term projections. To simulate this challenge, we apply the system-of-systems assessment methodology developed in Otto et al. (2014), and extended by Hickford et al. (2015), to assess the performance of a broad assortment of strategies for infrastructure provision to meeting the needs implied by a range of long-term exogenous future scenarios. The methodological framework is applied here through four key steps presented stylistic in Fig. 2:

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text