Arup UKIMEA managing director on resilience: systems thinking for UK infrastructure engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Arup UKIMEA managing director Paula Walsh calls for infrastructure resilience strategies that treat assets as parts of interdependent systems, rather than isolated projects, as climate-driven shocks, volatile material costs and supply chain fragility intensify. She points to recent UK flooding and heatwave events stressing rail corridors, urban drainage and power networks simultaneously, arguing for scenario-based planning that tests whole-system failure modes instead of single-asset design storms. For practitioners, this means earlier cross-discipline modelling, more flexible design envelopes and procurement that values adaptive capacity over lowest capital cost.
Technical Brief
- She calls for resilience criteria to be embedded in early option selection, alongside CDM and safety-by-design obligations.
- Scenario testing is framed as a safety tool: identifying cascading failures that could compromise evacuation, access and emergency response.
- Walsh links resilience planning to supply-chain safety, warning that material scarcity can drive unsafe substitutions or workmanship shortcuts.
- She argues that client briefs and procurement scoring should explicitly weight long-term safety and operability over lowest CAPEX.
- For similar UK infrastructure programmes, she suggests integrated hazard reviews combining climate, geotechnical and operational safety risks in one register.
Our Take
Arup’s UK resilience messaging sits alongside its recent roles on long‑horizon infrastructure planning such as the 30‑year Auckland Motorway Strategic Plan and Perth’s Westport‑linked freight rail upgrades, signalling that the firm is operationalising ‘resilience’ through decision‑led, network‑scale frameworks rather than project‑by‑project tweaks.
Within our 943‑story Infrastructure corpus, Arup appears frequently in complex urban schemes like Thameside West and 99 City Road, suggesting its UKIMEA stance on resilience will likely influence how London clients frame climate, social and economic robustness in dense, mixed‑use regeneration projects.
Arup’s involvement in the MOD‑backed Sheffield Forgemasters recapitalisation indicates that its resilience thinking is being tested not only in civil infrastructure but also in strategically sensitive industrial assets, where security of supply and continuity of operations are as critical as traditional safety and sustainability metrics.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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