Institution of Mechanical Engineers has warned that UK infrastructure planning is not adequately accounting for failures that spread between interconnected systems during extreme weather.
Research produced with the UK Infrastructure Operators Adaptation Forum argues that resilience planning should move beyond testing individual assets against isolated floods, heatwaves, droughts, or storms.
Infrastructure owners and government are instead being urged to examine compound events and cascading failures, where disruption in one network creates operational problems across several others.
Energy, water, telecommunications, transport, healthcare, food distribution, and digital infrastructure increasingly depend on each other to remain operational.
Dr Tim Fox, chair of the IMechE Climate Change Adaptation Working Group, said: “The biggest risk we face may not be one extreme event, but several occurring in series.”
Electricity provides one example. A prolonged heatwave can reduce the efficiency or availability of parts of the power system while increasing demand for cooling.
If electricity supply then fails, disruption can spread into telecommunications, data centres, water systems, refrigeration, transport, and health services.
The report calls for regular cross-sector exercises to test those dependencies rather than allowing each industry to model risk largely within its own boundaries.
It also recommends mapping critical dependencies on electricity, water, digital services, transport, suppliers, and staff, with particular attention to single points of failure.
A hospital may have backup power while remaining dependent on staff reaching the site, telecoms remaining available, data systems functioning, medical supplies arriving, and water services continuing.
A data centre can have redundant cooling and electricity systems but still be exposed to disruption in the wider grid, fibre connectivity, fuel deliveries, or physical access for specialist engineers.
Those interdependencies change how infrastructure resilience has to be assessed.
Much of Britain’s physical infrastructure was designed around historical weather patterns, while many assets being constructed now will remain operational for decades under potentially different climatic conditions.
The engineering groups want infrastructure to be designed so it can be adapted over time rather than relying on one fixed forecast of future conditions.
The Thames Estuary 2100 programme is cited as one model. It uses monitoring and decision points to determine when additional flood protection should be introduced instead of attempting to fix every intervention decades in advance.
The research also points to the NHS’s use of systems mapping to examine dependencies between healthcare, energy, telecommunications, and data centres.
Maintaining critical data in separate locations, for example, can reduce the chance that one infrastructure failure removes access to essential systems.
Similar dependencies run through commercial supply chains.
Manufacturers rely on power, transport, water, digital communications, and supplier continuity, while logistics operations increasingly depend on automated systems and live data alongside roads, ports, warehouses, and vehicles.
A severe weather event can therefore interrupt production even where a company’s own premises remain physically unaffected. The failure may occur in a network several steps removed from the site itself.
The recommendation to invest before failure also raises questions for infrastructure regulation.
Operators work within funding frameworks that can make it easier to justify spending once a problem is visible than to invest against low-frequency risks whose effects may not appear for years.
Keeping present costs down can therefore conflict with investment intended to reduce the much larger economic losses associated with system-wide disruption.
The engineering bodies argue that regulation and funding models should permit earlier resilience investment where future vulnerabilities can be demonstrated.
Cross-sector stress testing could then provide stronger evidence for determining where that capital is most urgently required.
The warning arrives as the UK increases investment in energy, data centres, transport, water, and other nationally important infrastructure.
Additional capacity can create redundancy and strengthen resilience, but greater interconnection can also create new dependencies if systems are designed without considering how disruption moves between sectors.
Information sharing between infrastructure operators consequently becomes more important. Individual organisations may understand the risks inside their own assets while having limited visibility over weaknesses embedded in the services on which those assets rely.
The report proposes regular cross-sector simulations in which several failures occur at once, allowing operators and government to test whether contingency plans remain workable under more complex conditions.
That would shift infrastructure planning away from the resilience of individual assets and towards continuity of the essential services those assets collectively provide.
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