MCLEAN, VIRGINIA — As extreme weather events grow more frequent and intense, ensuring the resilience of America’s infrastructure is no longer optional — it’s critical. That was the consensus among experts at the recent Building Innovation 2025 conference, hosted by the National Institute of Building Sciences, where panelists highlighted how targeted investments and emerging technologies can help communities better withstand and recover from disasters.

Lifeline infrastructure systems — such as water, electricity, and transportation — are essential for daily life, but their reliability often goes unrecognized until systems fail. Speakers at the conference emphasized that outdated infrastructure, deferred maintenance, and climate change are exposing vulnerabilities across the country.

“Much of our infrastructure is so old it’s built to standards that we no longer use. So it doesn’t work anymore,” said Joey Hopkins, Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Transportation. “Back in the ’60s, we built ramps that came in on the left side of the highway. We had very, very short acceleration lanes and deceleration lanes. Vehicles were smaller, they were slow back then. Things have changed.”

Recent disasters, such as Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires, have made the stakes clear. Yet, according to Madhu Beriwal, founder and chair of disaster preparedness consultancy IEM International, the federal funding system is often stuck in the past.

“Infrastructure was built in the 1950s to 1970s for a different climate regime, and we are trying to manage 21st century climate issues, not even talking about what could happen next century,” Beriwal said. She also warned that infrastructure failures often ripple across systems. “Each individual infrastructure is owned or operated by a different entity, and there’s not a lot of coordination between them to figure out what problem points are.”

Panelists argued that instead of just restoring damaged systems to their previous state, the U.S. must shift to functional recovery — the ability to maintain or quickly resume essential services following a shock. This concept should apply not only to buildings but also to the infrastructure systems they rely on.

“[Functional recovery] is something that can be an important concept, not only for buildings, but to begin to institutionalize that for lifelines,” said Ronald Eguchi, CEO and co-founder of ImageCat, a Long Beach-based risk management firm. “I think it’s very important, because now we’re sort of shifting the paradigm a little bit in terms of how we measure performance.”

To support this shift, the Lifeline Infrastructure Hub launched by NIBS brings together government agencies, nonprofits, and private industry to identify the most critical gaps and find cost-effective solutions for modern infrastructure resilience.

While the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided much-needed relief, it hasn’t fully addressed systemic funding shortfalls. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card shows that lifeline systems remain severely underfunded, a problem worsened by declining gas tax revenues.

“Inflation has hit us all in these last few years, and it’s put us further down than we were before,” said Hopkins. “Today we’ve got about a half a dozen communities in our state now that are saying, ‘Will you toll this route so we can get a project? We want it so bad we’re willing to accept the toll.’”

Some jurisdictions are taking lessons from past events to guide smarter reinvestment. Steven Nelson, general superintendent of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, explained that the city has discovered that infrastructure failures don’t always happen in the oldest areas.

“It’s not necessarily the oldest parts of the city that failed the most dramatically or most frequently,” Nelson said. “So I think that there is a major need for targeted investment.”

Technology is also playing an increasingly important role in maximizing limited public resources. Nelson noted that artificial intelligence and machine learning can help cities and utilities prioritize repairs that will deliver the greatest impact.

“We can take the limited resources that we have, develop a capital improvement program that’s based on actual failure rates, anticipated rates of failure in those locations that are most likely to have a catastrophic effect,” he said.

Another promising tool is the digital twin — a virtual replica of infrastructure systems that allows agencies to simulate different disaster scenarios.

“I don’t think we are fully utilizing [digital twins] in complex sorts of problems like lifelines and how they operate,” said Eguchi. “I think that digital twin models and utilizing that technology can very well help us better understand what the failures could be. What could be the impacts? How likely are these different things?”

As the climate continues to change and infrastructure continues to age, panelists emphasized that communities must plan smarter — not just harder — to ensure lifeline systems can endure the shocks of the future.

Originally reported by Julie Strupp in Construction Dive.