Who Pays for Resilience? Aligning Risk, Capital, and Operations in Infrastructure Investment
Infrastructure decisions are ultimately decisions about risk. Yet the way risk is perceived, measured, and acted upon varies significantly across the institutions responsible for financing, building, operating, and maintaining infrastructure systems. This panel brings together two influential perspectives at the heart of infrastructure investment: the development financier and the private capital market. Their dialogue will help explore how different stakeholders evaluate risk, translate operational realities into financial decisions, and determine what level of resilience justifies investment.
As infrastructure systems face growing performance expectations, aging assets, climate pressures, and increasing demands for reliability and continuity, traditional approaches to valuation and financing are being challenged. How do public and private investors prioritize resilience? What risks remain invisible, mispriced, or inadequately addressed? When does resilience become an investment opportunity rather than simply a cost? And how can better information help bridge the gap between engineering performance, operational realities, and capital allocation?
Drawing on experiences from both development finance and private investment, the panel will provide attendees with a unique window into how infrastructure capital is deployed, what drives investment decisions, and how resilience can increasingly shape the future of infrastructure financing. Ultimately, the discussion will connect many of the themes explored throughout ICONHIC—from engineering and risk assessment to insurance, resilience, and regeneration—showing how they converge in the decisions that determine which projects get financed, which risks get managed, and which communities benefit from long-term investment.