11 Critical Infrastructure in Peril
Key Concepts
In this chapter we will:
- Describe Critical Infrastructure
- Explore how critical infrastructure is impacted by disturbances
11.1 Critical infrastructure
Critical infrastructure typically refers to physical infrastructure like the network of highways, connecting bridges and tunnels, railways, utilities and buildings necessary to maintain normalcy in daily life. Physical infrastructure allows the transportation of people, goods, water, sewage, electricity, oil and gas, information, etc. This infrastructure is referred to as critical since its malfunctioning could have major consequences for the economy and safety of people.
The USA has an agency devoted to managing the function of critical infrastructure, namely the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose mission it is to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure. CISA distinguishes sixteen sectors and they mainly relate to hard infrastructure like dams, manufacturing, energy and transportation, but also include mixed infrastructure systems like health care and the financial system.
In the rest of this chapter we will discuss some examples of critical infrastructure, especially within the USA, from a CIS perspective and the challenges they may experience in the near future.
11.2 Vulnerability of Critical infrastructure
The main challenge for critical infrastructure is that physical infrastructure deteriorates over time, and the deterioration of infrastructure is not always clearly visible. Managing infrastructure thus requires inspections to identify potential vulnerabilities. For example, around 8% of the bridges in the USA are identified as structurally deficient, but are still in use.
Every four years, the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) evaluates the state of the American Infrastructure. The report card for American Infrastructure after the most recent evaluation is a C-. Types of infrastructure that get a C or higher are bridges (but see above the share of structurally deficient bridges), rail, ports and solid waste. Obviously the ASCE has a stake in having a critical evaluation of the infrastructure and recommending more work. Nevertheless, the state of its infrastructure has been a concern in the USA for recent administrations. Improving the state of infrastructure is one of the few bi-partician priorities as witnessed by the significant Infrastructure investments during the Biden administration.
In the following sections we discuss a number of examples from a coupled infrastructure perspective. We will explore potential vulnerabilities of the hard infrastructure to anticipated changes in the social and biophysical environment such as climate change and artificial intelligence.
11.3 Transportation Infrastructure
ASCE gave American road infrastructure a grade of “D” since the roads “are often crowded, frequently in poor condition, chronically underfunded, and are becoming more dangerous.” The condition of roads is impacted by weather conditions (frost, rain, heat), and the stress imposed by the combination of the weight and number of vehicles on the road. A country like the USA is car-oriented, which impacts the way cities are developed and the level of widely accessible public transportation that is provided within and between cities and towns. Despite the physical layout of cities centered around cars, there are traffic jams. The average time delay for commuters is steadily increasing to more than 40 hours a year.
The quality of roads is measured each year via a random sample of roads in each state using the International Roughness Index, and the results show that quality has been improving over the years. This seems inconsistent with the experience of the users who complain about deteriorating roads. This is even a popular complaint by US Presidents in State of the Union addresses.
One reason for this discrepancy about the measured and experienced quality of roads is that there has not been a systematic evaluation of the quality of the roads users actually experience, only a random sample of road surfaces in various states. This may change when new technologies enable car drivers to use an app to monitor the road quality they experience. Getting information from the road user’s perspective instead of the road provider’s perspective may lead to better feedback on the quality of the roads.
There is, however, a systematic underinvestment in road infrastructure, largely due to the lack of tax collected to keep up with the increasing costs of maintenance. For example, the Federal Highway Administration’s Trust Fund functions as the mechanism to generate revenue, mainly from fuel taxes, and distribute the resources to approved highway projects across the USA. The fuel tax per gallon has not been increased since the 1990s, and with increasing fuel efficiency of cars (and now also electric vehicles), it is no surprise that since the 2000s, expenditures have been higher than the revenues, requiring various interventions to keep the Highway Trust Fund operational.
In sum, US citizens depend on cars and roads, but the US population as a whole is not investing in proper maintenance at the local and federal level.. The prospects for road infrastructure are not great with some of the changes that are expected to impact road infrastructure in the near future. Novel or extreme weather conditions due to climate change could impact the road quality. But perhaps the biggest vulnerability of the functionality of the road infrastructure are the rapid changes in vehicle transportation.
In recent years we have seen an increase in miles traveled due to deliveries of packages from online shopping and buying rides via Uber and Lyft. We also start seeing autonomous vehicles, and improved road assistance technology that could impact the capacity of the roads. In theory, those ride technologies may increase the capacity of roads since artificial intelligence supported coordination between cars allow them to drive closer to each other without causing traffic jams.
Those changes in technology and use of cars may impact how people commute and where they live. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a change in human behavior that is expected to last, namely an increase in working from home. This may lead to changes where people want to live and thus demand for road infrastructure.
The path dependency of road infrastructure is an important factor in how new technological solutions can be implemented. Phoenix, the city where we are located, is designed as a grid system, where each mile there is a main road, and typically on the corner of each grid there is a gas station. Such a layout stimulated an urban sprawl of single floor single family houses. Such an urban design does not lend itself to transitioning to a high density urban area dependent on public transportation. On the other hand, old European cities were built very compact and do not accommodate a high dependency on cars. We see more diverse use of transportation systems, from public transport to scooters and bicycles.
Those different urban layouts may impact how technology could be implemented. Phoenix is a test location for autonomous vehicles due to its grid system and good weather. It is unknown whether autonomous vehicles will become reliable enough to drive within old European cities. Both spread out American cities and compact old European cities will have high costs to adjust design to new technologies. Since most of the new urban development is happening in the global south, how will transportation infrastructure, especially roads, be implemented?
Most cities in the global south provide a mixture of public transportation and motorized road transportation. The rapid increase of motorized vehicles, motors and cars, has led to problems with air pollution leading to the death of millions of people each year. Cities in China and India are known for their smog during certain times of the year. In China, this has stimulated the transition to electric vehicles to reduce air pollution.
The experience with transportation systems in the global south is mixed as experienced by the authors. The metro and train systems in China and Japan are crowded but reliable, while the roads in those countries have continuous traffic jams. It is difficult to see how an increase in transportation capacity can be accommodated. Traveling in India is a life changing experience since there seems to be no acknowledgement of the rules of the road. The high density of motorcycles, cars and cows makes the roads dangerous and polluted. . Also here it is difficult to see how an increase in transportation demand can be accommodated, especially since technological solutions like autonomous and electric vehicles are less suitable.
In conclusion, road infrastructure experiences long term challenges in maintaining sufficient capacity for transportation demand and controlling air pollution. Although public transportation is a desirable solution to address those challenges, the trends are an increased individualization of motorized transportation.
11.4 Water and Waste Water Infrastructure
We have noted that all infrastructure types share fundamental features and one of the most important functions of infrastructure is to move stuff, whether people, goods, electrons, information bits, or water from one place to another. Thus water infrastructure is a special kind of transportation infrastructure that moves, you guessed it, water from one place to another. It is a curious combination of natural (rivers, and lakes) and built (canals, dams, weirs, tanks) infrastructures that moves water from the tops of mountains to our crops and taps. It has a curious feature in that water can be used over and over again for different purposes and a critical attribute of water is its quality. So water infrastructures typically involve moving clean water to a given location and move dirty water away from that location. Although efforts to create infrastructure to provide safe drinking water and dispose of waste waters goes back thousands of years, it was the 1800s during which a rapid increase of this type of infrastructure began to be observed in urban areas in the USA and Europe. Nowadays most of the world has access to safe drinking water, although safe drinking water from the tap is restricted to mainly North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia.
The huge investments in water infrastructure in the 1800s and early 1900s in North America and Europe has led to an aging infrastructure with an average age of a water pipe in the USA of 45 years. About 10-20% of the water is leaking and thus wasted in the USA. This is significant but considerably lower than more than 50% in various cities in the global south. In fact, the state of the infrastructure is difficult to measure since pipes are underground, and we mainly find out when pipes burst.
A tragic example is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where starting in 2014 the drinking water was contaminated by lead caused by short cuts made to save money with an aging water distribution system to provide drinking water to the community. There are many communities like Flint, Michigan, where the drinking water infrastructure is outdated and could lead to public health challenges. Regulation changes in 1986 and 1996 prohibit the use of materials that could lead to lead in drinking water, but still there are an estimated 6 to 10 million service lines in the USA. To be able to provide safe drinking water to customers in the USA, the price of water is expected to continue to rise substantially to cope with the aging infrastructure.
Climate change is expected to impact the water infrastructure at different levels is significant ways. Changes in precipitation and temperature lead to long term droughts and rapid flooding events. The current infrastructure is not able to cope with those changes. This may lead to changes in capacity (to increase capacity to buffer major rainfall events, also be increasing natural infrastructure like wetlands), and reduction of demand. Demand reduction is partly possible by technology (drip irrigation, low water use toilets, efficient shower heads) but also changes in behavior (change in landscaping to reduce need for irrigation). Increased amount of recycling of waste water is happening in various places in the southwest of the USA. This technological solution also experiences social challenges since people have a resistance to drink recycled pee, while the quality of the recycled drinking water is superior.
In the global south water infrastructure is more diverse and more unequal. If you have piped water, you are not recommended to drink it without boiling the water first. Poor neighborhoods often do not have piped water and rely on water trucks or buying bottled water. Waste water is often not treated leading to pollution and eutrophication of waterways.
In sum, the aging water infrastructure in North America and Europe will be expensive to update and adapt to changing climate reality. There is increasing availability of water infrastructure in the global south, but there is significant inequality in availability and performance.
11.5 Energy infrastructure
Like water infrastructure moves water, energy infrastructure moves electrons. Similar to water, modern energy infrastructure, especially electricity, stems from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The centralized electricity system provides a reliable supply of energy made possible by the creation of standards (like the alternating current (AC) from Nicolas Tesla to distribute electricity). The creation of a centralized infrastructure allowed it to connect to large electricity generation facilities such as hydroelectricity generating dams, nuclear power plants, coal power plants, etc.
Electricity is much more difficult to store than water, requires batteries (the analogue of a reservoir in water systems, so one needs to produce electricity when there is demand (imagine trying to ‘produce’ water on demand). The combination of sources varying from low cost inflexible nuclear energy, to flexible but costly fossil fuel power generation, allows the centralized electricity system to function without frequent power outages.
About 40% of the energy inputs (fossil fuels, gravity in hydroelectric systems, wind, solar radiation) are used for electricity generation, the rest of fossil fuels and renewable energy is used directly for mainly transportation and industrial purposes. Think about the gasoline used for cars, and fossil fuels used to power large factories.
Like other critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure is aging, and there is a major shift in sources of electricity generation that will have a major impact on the vulnerability of the infrastructure. The increasing use of solar, wind and other decentralized energy sources makes the centralized electricity grid more difficult to control. Especially solar and wind power are not reliable sources, and other electricity generation needs to kick in when the sun sets or the wind calms. Those are expensive solutions. In fact, during some parts of the day there might be a surplus of electricity that has to be wasted (grounded), while other times expensive solutions have to be used.
Another trend is a decentralized energy system where neighborhoods or households go off the grid, relying on solar power with batteries to store electricity surplus. A vulnerability created by this approach is that those who go off the grid are often wealthier than the average American and do not continue to provide financial support for the public electricity grid. This will make the financial sustainability of the public electricity infrastructure more vulnerable.
Another dependency is the use of water for cooling and hydroelectric power. With water shortages in the southwestern USA (and with water temperature increasing), this could also impact electricity generation. This will be especially challenging during times when energy demand will be high (for running air conditioners). As such the interaction between water and electricity infrastructure increases the risk of blackouts during the summer months in the southwestern USA.
The war in the Ukraine revealed the vulnerability of international energy infrastructure where especially Europe depends on the natural gas and oil provided by Russia via an international system of pipelines. European countries started to decommission nuclear and coal power plants to meet environmental targets, and import gas and oil. However, those decisions had to be reversed, together with a major reduction in energy demand from industry and households to keep the economic system functioning.
Those complex centralized and cross-border energy infrastructures can be found in most countries in the global south, especially with hydroelectric power. However, many rural communities bypass the centralized energy system by adoption of affordable solar energy that can provide sufficient electricity for key energy uses. An open question is whether those solar energy systems are sufficient with the rapid increase of demand for electricity when rural areas start urbanizing.
11.6 Food Supply Chain infrastructure
Where does our food actually come from? As water infrastructure moves water, energy infrastructure moves electrons, food supply chain infrastructure moves food, and all three infrastructures are intertwined. Many of us buy food in the supermarket and are not involved in food production. However, this is only possible due to the complex agricultural systems connected with an international food supply chain system. We focus in this section on the distribution of food after its primary production.
Another eye opening vulnerability we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is the vulnerability of the food supply chain. Due to COVID outbreaks in some major meat processing facilities within the USA, there was a scarcity of certain types of meat. Those meat processing facilities were extra vulnerable due to the close proximity of the workers making it convenient for the virus to spread. Other disruptions experienced in the USA during the pandemic was the lack of the migrant workers that help harvesting, especially in California. And a lack of trained truck drivers caused delays in the transportation of food stuffs.
The war in the Ukraine, the main source of wheat for many countries in Africa and Asia, is causing food insecurity at an international level. As you might guess, the problem is caused, in part, by disrupted transportation infrastructure that relies on waterways. Specifically, wheat could not leave the Ukraine due to blocked ports in the Black Sea. The story of the Ever Given is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of our food supply chains to vagaries of coupled infrastructure systems.
On the morning of 23 March 2021, this giant container ship, one of the largest in the world, suddenly ran aground diagonally while passing through the Suez Canal on its way to Rotterdam and blocked the entire canal. Because of its enormous size, shipping traffic was jammed in both directions for six days. Billions of US dollars’ worth of trade on hundreds of vessels came to a standstill. This curious combination of private infrastructure in the form of an enormous ship designed for transport efficiency and shared infrastructure of the Suez canal illustrate ‘bottleneck fragilities’ in coupled infrastructure systems that can impact billions of people.
The ‘bottleneck’ in the Suez Canal example is the reliance on a single constellation of infrastructures: a single route and a single mode of transport. In food systems, such bottlenecks take various forms, especially in the natural infrastructure component of the system, most specifically, genes in seeds. Genes can be seen as information storage infrastructure (software code) and seeds as a device for storing the code. You store the ‘genes’ of your photos in a sequence of zeros and ones on a ‘seed’ in the form of a USB flash drive. The code for plants has been written over millions of years of trial and error to cope with many conditions. We edit the code to maximize output of a particular plant in very controlled conditions. Controlling those conditions requires a lot of other infrastructure, e.g. chemical fertilizers, water control, etc. One thing we can’t control is the susceptibility of plants to pests that mutate constantly. If we rely on one food plant (one canal) that is decimated by a pest (the ship runs around), we are very vulnerable indeed. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how our livestock systems are vulnerable to disease outbreaks where livestock are moved around to owners who specialized in different parts of the life cycle in a sort of constant ‘super spreader event’.
11.7 Critical reflections
Infrastructure, once constructed, lasts for a long time. Infrastructure needs to be maintained by a specialized workforce. The longevity of infrastructure makes it costly and time consuming to adapt to changing conditions. With a rapidly changing society and climate change, how can infrastructure be adjusted to new conditions?
11.8 Make yourself think
- What disruptions of infrastructure systems did you experience during the COVID-19 pandemic?
- Do you know what happened, when you experienced a disruption in electricity or internet connectivity in your household?
11.9 References
Janssen, M.A., J.M. Anderies, A. Baeza, H.L. Breetz, T. Jasinski, H.C. Shin, and S. Vallury (2022), Highways as coupled infrastructure systems: An integrated approach to address sustainability challenges, Resilience and Sustainable Infrastructure 7(2): 100-111.
Walker, B., Crépin, A. S., Nyström, M., Anderies, J. M., Andersson, E., Elmqvist, T., … & Vincent, J. R. (2023). Response diversity as a sustainability strategy. Nature Sustainability, 1-9.
