Resilient infrastructure for a sustainable world

Summary

This discussion focused on resilience in critical infrastructure and technology systems, exploring how organizations can build capacity to withstand and recover from disasters and disruptions. The panel included representatives from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), ICANN, the Marconi Society, and CERN, moderated by Mike Mullane from the IEC. Helen Ng from UNDRR explained how her organization supports countries in implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, emphasizing the need to integrate resilience into infrastructure planning and address multi-hazard scenarios rather than single threats.

Maarten Botterman from ICANN and the Marconi Society highlighted how society’s dependence on the internet has transformed it from a luxury to a necessity, requiring a shift from rapid deployment to reliable, resilient systems. He discussed the interconnected nature of critical infrastructures, where failures in one system can cascade across sectors like energy, communications, and finance. Benjamin Frisch from CERN presented the White Rabbit project as an example of how open collaboration and precise time synchronization technology developed for particle physics research has found applications in financial trading and power grid management.

Key challenges identified included the gap between disaster risk reduction and infrastructure development, the difficulty of retrofitting legacy systems for resilience, and the need for cross-sectoral collaboration. The discussion also explored the relationship between resilience and sustainability, with participants generally agreeing that resilience is essential for achieving sustainable development goals. The panel emphasized that no single organization can address these complex challenges alone, making partnerships and capacity building crucial for creating resilient infrastructure systems that can support society’s growing technological dependence.

Keypoints

## Major Discussion Points:

– **Defining and Understanding Resilience**: The discussion explored resilience as both the ability to “bounce back” from disasters (from Latin “resiliere” – to rebound) and the proactive design of systems that can withstand disruptions. Speakers emphasized that resilience isn’t just about recovery but also about prevention and building robust systems from the start.

– **Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies**: A key theme was how modern infrastructure systems are deeply interconnected – when power fails, internet stops working, which affects hospitals, communications, and other essential services. The speakers highlighted the need for cross-sectoral collaboration to understand these dependencies and prevent cascading failures.

– **Challenges in Implementation**: The panel discussed significant barriers including lack of common understanding of what resilience means across organizations, short-term political thinking that makes it difficult to invest in prevention, budget constraints, and the challenge of upgrading legacy systems while maintaining current operations.

– **The Relationship Between Resilience and Sustainability**: Speakers debated whether resilience and sustainability are becoming synonymous, with general agreement that resilience is either a subset of sustainability or an essential enabler for achieving sustainable development goals. They emphasized that without resilient infrastructure, sustainable development gains cannot be safeguarded.

– **Importance of Partnerships and Open Collaboration**: All speakers stressed that no single organization can address these complex challenges alone. They highlighted the need for multi-stakeholder approaches involving governments, academia, industry, and civil society, along with capacity building and knowledge sharing across sectors and regions.

## Overall Purpose:

The discussion aimed to explore the concept of resilience in critical infrastructure from multiple perspectives, examining how different organizations approach building resilient systems, the challenges they face, and the collaborative approaches needed to address complex, interconnected infrastructure vulnerabilities in an increasingly digital and interdependent world.

## Overall Tone:

The tone was professional and collaborative throughout, with speakers building on each other’s points constructively. There was a sense of urgency about the challenges discussed, but also optimism about solutions through cooperation. The conversation maintained an academic yet practical focus, with speakers sharing real-world examples and concrete experiences. The moderator kept the discussion interactive and accessible, using relatable analogies (like the Big Bad Wolf story) to introduce complex concepts. The tone remained consistently engaged and solution-oriented rather than alarmist, despite discussing serious infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Speakers

**Speakers from the provided list:**

– **Mike Mullane** – Moderator, works at the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) on cybersecurity and AI, focusing on resilience and mitigation

– **Benjamin Frisch** – Works for CERN (European organization for nuclear research), involved in the White Rabbit project for clock synchronization technology

– **Helen Ng** – Works at UNDRR (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction), focuses on resilient infrastructure and supporting countries to enhance infrastructure resilience through governance

– **Kishor Narang** – Active in IEC’s smart city work, has been leading smart city sanitization in India, involved in developing unified digital infrastructure for cities

– **Maarten Botterman** – Wearing two hats: works with Marconi Society and ICANN, focuses on internet infrastructure resilience and cross-sectoral collaboration

– **Audience** – Various audience members who asked questions during the interactive session

**Additional speakers:**

– **Ian Opperman** – Was supposed to join from Australia but had connection issues and did not participate in the discussion

– **Pierre** – An audience member from AFNIC (a registry of domain names) who asked a specific question about sustainable development goals and infrastructure

# Comprehensive Report: Resilience in Critical Infrastructure and Technology Systems

## Introduction and Context

This discussion brought together representatives from diverse international organisations to explore resilience in critical infrastructure and technology systems. Moderated by Mike Mullane from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the panel featured Helen Ng from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), Maarten Botterman representing both the Marconi Society and ICANN, Benjamin Frisch from CERN’s White Rabbit project, and Kishor Narang, who leads smart city initiatives in India. Ian Opperman from Australia was scheduled to participate but experienced connectivity issues and could not join the discussion.

The conversation maintained a collaborative tone throughout, with speakers building on each other’s insights while addressing urgent challenges facing modern interconnected infrastructure systems. The discussion explored how organisations can build capacity to withstand and recover from disasters and disruptions in an increasingly digital and interdependent world.

## Defining Resilience: Multiple Perspectives

Mike Mullane opened by explaining that resilience derives from the Latin “resiliere,” meaning to rebound, and noted how children’s stories often illustrate this concept of bouncing back from adversity. However, the discussion revealed that resilience encompasses much more than simple recovery.

Maarten Botterman positioned resilience as fundamental for critical infrastructure, emphasising both prevention and quick recovery capabilities. He highlighted society’s growing dependence on internet infrastructure: “we’ve become so dependent on the internet that when the power goes out, or the roads are blocked, or a mobile doesn’t work, everything else stops. And it’s no longer a technical luxury, but a societal necessity.”

Helen Ng from UNDRR acknowledged that different governments have varying understandings of resilience, advocating for focusing on common principles rather than definitional debates. She specifically referenced the Sendai Framework Target D, which aims to substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services.

The definitional discussion revealed tension between the need for clear frameworks and the practical reality of working across diverse organisational contexts—a theme that would resurface throughout the conversation.

## Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies

A central theme was the deeply interconnected nature of modern infrastructure and cascading failure effects. Botterman illustrated this with examples from Spain and Portugal, where electricity outages demonstrated how internet infrastructure dependencies mean that power failures cascade through hospitals, communications, financial systems, and other essential services.

This interconnectedness has transformed infrastructure design requirements. As Botterman noted, society’s dependence on the internet requires shifting from “time to market” thinking to “reliability first” approaches, with profound implications for how infrastructure is designed, funded, and maintained.

Benjamin Frisch provided concrete examples through CERN’s White Rabbit project, originally developed for precise time synchronisation in particle physics experiments. The technology has found applications in financial trading systems, power grid management, and potentially quantum computing precisely because accurate timing is fundamental across multiple critical infrastructure sectors.

Kishor Narang offered a different perspective through India’s smart city development experience. Rather than allowing separate utility systems that would later need integration, India’s 100 smart cities initiative created unified digital infrastructure from the start, with 8000 cities learning from this approach. This integrated design, he argued, reduces carbon footprint, improves cybersecurity, and creates inherent resilience compared to siloed systems.

## Implementation Challenges

The conversation revealed significant barriers spanning technical, political, and economic dimensions. Helen Ng outlined key obstacles UNDRR encounters: multi-hazard considerations, interdependency understanding, short-term political thinking, and budget constraints. She specifically mentioned Bhutan’s GovTech department as an example of innovative approaches to these challenges.

The challenge of multi-hazard considerations is particularly acute for small island developing states. As Helen Ng observed: “they don’t have the luxury of bouncing back or recovering. So they’re always stuck in this cycle of… if you’re constantly being hit by something, you don’t have time to recover.” This powerfully illustrated inequality in resilience capacity.

Botterman addressed technical challenges of legacy systems, noting that evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes are required for infrastructure serving billions of users. He mentioned specific technologies like DNSSEC, RPKI, ROA, and DMARC as examples of gradual improvements to internet resilience.

Benjamin Frisch highlighted unique challenges of designing systems for extremely long operational periods. CERN’s Future Circular Collider project, starting operations in 2047 with plans extending to the 2090s, exemplifies the generational thinking required for truly resilient infrastructure.

## Standards Development and Technological Change

Helen Ng raised concerns about standards development speed versus rapid technological change, creating particular challenges for developing countries seeking guidance on technology adoption.

Mike Mullane explained that while full standards typically require 2-3 years for proper consensus-building, organisations also produce faster technical specifications to address immediate needs. He emphasised that standards development balances consensus-building requirements with technological adaptation needs, and that anticipating future requirements is part of the process.

Benjamin Frisch offered CERN’s perspective on open collaboration, explaining how creating open ecosystems around technologies like White Rabbit enables broader participation and faster adoption across sectors. This approach suggests that open collaboration can help address speed versus consensus challenges in standards development.

## Sustainability and Resilience Interconnections

The relationship between sustainability and resilience emerged as a significant theme. Helen Ng positioned them as interconnected concepts, arguing that resilient infrastructure is needed to safeguard development gains and that without resilience, sustainable development achievements cannot be maintained.

Kishor Narang took a more definitive position, stating that “you cannot be sustainable without being resilient” and arguing that resilience is a subset of the sustainability paradigm.

The discussion took on particular urgency when Kishor raised concerns about artificial intelligence, calling it “the new plastic” of the 21st century and noting that “AI is really a carbon energy guzzler” while “the AI ecosystem is still not listening to the sustainability aspect.”

Benjamin Frisch contributed the perspective of long-term machine design, noting that CERN’s decades-long operational timelines require considering carbon impact and environmental sustainability from the design phase.

## Collaboration Models and Partnerships

All speakers emphasised that building resilient infrastructure requires collaborative approaches transcending traditional boundaries. Helen Ng outlined UNDRR’s multi-stakeholder approach involving government, academia, industry, and civil society, emphasising UNDRR’s role as a convening organisation.

Benjamin Frisch described CERN’s model of international collaboration across member states with open global participation, enabling technologies like White Rabbit to serve broader societal needs beyond their original research purpose.

Botterman highlighted capacity building through training and education at multiple levels, from primary school to professional development, including efforts to develop integrative university curricula on internet governance covering technologies, governance, and policy dimensions.

## Economic Dimensions and Sustainability Concerns

An important intervention came from audience member Pierre from AFNIC, who raised concerns about economic sustainability of infrastructure operators. He highlighted how market forces directing investment toward higher-value applications like AI could undermine basic infrastructure resilience if foundational service providers lack stable financing.

This economic dimension connected to broader themes about infrastructure interdependence and the need for holistic resilience approaches. The concern was that if basic infrastructure operators cannot maintain stable operations due to economic pressures, higher-level services built on that infrastructure become vulnerable regardless of their technical sophistication.

## Technology Development and Open Innovation

Benjamin Frisch provided detailed examples through CERN’s White Rabbit project, demonstrating how open source approaches enable wider adoption and societal benefit. Originally developed for nanosecond-level time synchronisation in particle physics, White Rabbit now serves financial trading, power grid management, and other critical infrastructure sectors.

The success illustrates key principles: open collaboration enables broader participation and faster innovation; technologies developed for extreme requirements often have applications in other demanding environments; and creating ecosystems around technologies enables adaptation serving diverse needs.

Kishor Narang’s description of India’s unified digital infrastructure approach for smart cities demonstrated how strategic technology choices can create inherent resilience through integration rather than requiring resilience to be added to fragmented systems.

## Areas of Consensus and Continuing Challenges

Despite representing diverse organisations, speakers demonstrated remarkable consensus on fundamental principles. All agreed that collaboration and partnerships are essential, that resilience requires both prevention and recovery capabilities, and that sustainability and resilience are interconnected concepts.

However, several challenges remain unresolved. The tension between standards development timeframes and technological change continues to create difficulties, particularly for developing countries. Questions about ensuring stable financing for infrastructure operators as resources shift toward higher-value applications represent a systemic challenge requiring policy attention.

The balance between AI system energy consumption and sustainability goals represents an emerging challenge that requires continued attention as AI becomes more prevalent in infrastructure systems.

## Practical Outcomes and Next Steps

The discussion concluded with concrete steps for continued collaboration. Mike Mullane proposed establishing a WhatsApp group for ongoing conversation and invited participants to contact him at mmu.iec.ch for continued engagement in a wider conversation platform.

The practical outcomes reflected the collaborative spirit characterising the discussion, with speakers recognising that the challenges discussed require ongoing engagement rather than one-time solutions. The emphasis on combining global expertise with local knowledge and implementation capacity suggests a promising direction for future resilience initiatives.

## Conclusion

This discussion demonstrated both the complexity of building resilient infrastructure in an interconnected world and the potential for collaborative approaches to address these challenges. The convergence of perspectives from disaster risk reduction, internet governance, scientific research, and smart city development created rich dialogue that moved beyond traditional sectoral boundaries.

The strong consensus on fundamental principles—particularly the need for collaboration, the interconnection of sustainability and resilience, and the importance of both prevention and recovery capabilities—provides a solid foundation for future work. The discussion illustrated that resilience is not merely a technical challenge but a societal imperative requiring coordinated responses across multiple domains.

As Botterman noted, quoting Vint Cerf, the transformation of internet infrastructure from a technical luxury to a societal necessity exemplifies how our approach to infrastructure must evolve to match society’s growing dependence on interconnected systems. The path forward requires sustained commitment to collaborative principles, continued innovation in technical and governance approaches, and recognition that building resilient infrastructure is ultimately about building resilient societies.

Mike Mullane: going to start and we can continue trying to connect to Ian, of course, Ian Opperman who will be joining us from Australia. My name is Mike Mullane. I’m delighted you found time to join us this afternoon. As I was coming over, I was thinking about resilience, obviously, and making a mental list of what the most important issues are. And it occurred to me that resilience is such an enormously important topic that we learn about it as children. The big bad wolf huffs and puffs and blows down the house made of sticks. He blows down the house made of straw, but he can’t blow down the house made of bricks because it’s resilient. Of course, that’s only one aspect of resilience. If we look at the etymology of the word itself, it comes from the Latin resiliere, which means to rebound, to come back. And a lot of what resilience is about, as we’ll be hearing from our panel, is about the ability to come back from a disaster, from a negative episode and to restore business or to continue as before. And of course, that’s also true of children’s stories. All the best heroes are people that have to come back from a negative and bad experience, and they bounce back. And that’s why we love them as heroes. And this impact, this aspect of mitigating, of helping organizations to recover, is central to a lot of the work that I’ve been doing at the IEC connected to cybersecurity, and to AI, where the emphasis really is on trying to mitigate, trying to make sure that when those cyber attacks happen, for example, because they always will happen, that organizations are strong enough, are resilient enough to bounce back as soon as possible and to continue on their normal course. We were going to start with with Ian, but I don’t think he’s he can join us yet. So I wanted to start with an organization that has a name that really tells us what they do, and it’s the UNDRR, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Helen, can you tell us a bit about your work and about the organization?

Helen Ng: Sure, thank you. So as many of, maybe some of you don’t know, but the UNDRR, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, is the UN agency that is responsible for coordinating efforts to reduce disaster risk and also promote resilience. So we support the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. This is a 15-year global agreement to reduce disaster risks and enhance resilience, and we take a all-of-society approach. And within the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, there is the Target D, which aims, which specifically aims at substantially reducing disaster risk, reducing disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services. So this is the area where I work on resilient infrastructure, supporting countries to enhance their infrastructure resilience by strengthening their governance. And we do this by integrating resilience into infrastructure planning and development. strengthening governance by helping develop strategies, strengthening regulatory frameworks and legislative frameworks, assessing infrastructure risks and interdependencies of these risks, and also improving financing through better public spending and budget allocations and private investment mobilization for countries. Just a quick question, how do you go about ensuring that your strategies are as inclusive as possible? So our focal points are really, we work directly with the Sendai focal points, which usually are the national disaster management agencies. And so we try to bring all of the different stakeholders together. So the different line ministries that work on infrastructure, so this could be the Ministries of Infrastructure, the Ministries of Energy, Transport, ICT. So in Bhutan, for example, there’s a department called GovTech. So that’s more of an independent government organization. So it’s about bringing the different actors and stakeholders that work on infrastructure together to develop these strategies.

Mike Mullane: Thanks, Helen. Helen Ng from UNDRR. Next, turn next to Martin Boteman, who’s wearing two hats today, Marconi Society, and ICANN. What does resilience mean for you?

Maarten Botterman: Well, resilience is something that you really need, if you become dependent on something, right? It’s not a play thing anymore. We need the internet. We rely on it. If we don’t have it, society grinds to a halt. Vint Cerf, if I may quote him, we’ve become so dependent on the internet that when the power goes out, or the roads are blocked, or a mobile doesn’t work, everything else stops. And it’s no longer a technical luxury, but a societal necessity. And that means we need to change our thinking, where in the early days it was about time to market and get out there with the most funky stuff as soon as possible. It’s now make sure that people can rely on it and put the emphasis there. So ICANN is very strong on that. Let’s keep the internet going and the infrastructure is well protected, always under attack, but it doesn’t let you down. If somebody says the internet doesn’t work, they probably don’t mean the internet. They may mean the Wi-Fi or sometimes even the 5G networks. So that’s one thing, but I agree with you that it’s about bouncing back. But I think if you really think about critical infrastructures, it’s also about prevention, about designing in resilience, that it’s not easy to topple it over. And if it topples over, that there’s also quick ways of recovering the bouncing back.

Mike Mullane: Tell me a little bit about the project you’re working on with the Marconi people.

Maarten Botterman: Marconi Society, I have a couple of slides on that that will help. It’s been established as a response to this urgent need for discussing cross-sectoral, not only within the internet environment, but too often even today’s talk in silence. And as you can probably recognize some of the people in that picture, it’s really brought up some enthusiasm to think out of the box and say, so what could possibly go wrong? Let’s not go too deep in that because that would be taking the rest of the session. But four threats are that we see is the tangled systems that hidden links trigger chain reactions. If electricity falls out, the internet will stop working. And as we’ve seen, for instance, in Spain, Portugal, but but even in Switzerland, that electricity outages lead to real breakdown of communications, that hospitals can’t function anymore, et cetera. You see how important the links are. Regulatory friction, that you see that technology development at times is much faster than policy development and regulatory development. And we need to do something about that. The funding gap, it’s that there’s a lot of money to go to market. There’s less money in general to stay in the market. And the software fellowship is really that one flaw can collapse a whole chain of events. We’re trying to look at that. We’re trying to also do crossovers to the energy sector to the finance sector, because gas doesn’t come if you can’t pay the bills, et cetera. This cross-sectoral is something we want to focus on starting this year. If you look at the next slide, this is a report that you can download from MarconiSociety.org. We are looking at the moment with a focus on build and promote and always be rolling program. How can we make sure we always roll? And if there’s a hiccup, that we roll very quickly again. The sectoral and infrastructure interdependencies and in this world today with changing geopolitical situations, I dare say, governance and international collaboration becomes more important than ever. The last slide is really the takeaways from Norway. Resilience is foundational. Power and internet are so interdependent. And resilience requires proactive investment, not only to go to market again, but also to stay in the market. and cross-sectoral collaboration is not a natural thing we do. We are organized in silos, but we need to. No single actor can make the society resilient all by himself.

Mike Mullane: That’s why we like to say at the IEC that the problems we face as a society are too huge for any organization, any one organization, to take on alone. So partnership, collaboration, absolutely critical. I started by talking about children’s stories and the Big Bad Wolf, and one of the reasons was our next speaker, Benjamin Frisch, is involved in the White Rabbit project. And the thing about the White Rabbit is I remember a White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland who’s always running around saying that he’s late. But your White Rabbit is always on time.

Benjamin Frisch: I was wondering whether we are the Big Bad Wolf or how that was going to link. Stop being afraid, having to justify what we do. So I work for CERN, a European organization for nuclear research, and White Rabbit is a technology that was developed for our own needs more than 15 years ago to synchronize clocks. Sounds very simple, but if you’ve ever, I mean, if you look at one clock, you will know what time it is. If you take two clocks, you will realize that they might not show exactly the same time. Now the issue is there are many applications where you need to precisely synchronize your clocks. What we do at CERN is we do fundamental research in particle physics, and we operate the infrastructure that’s needed for that. That means accelerators, detectors, and computing system. And in the accelerators, the biggest one is the Large Hadron Collider, just, well, a couple kilometers north of where we are right now. We accelerate particles almost to the speed of light. They fly in a ring 27 kilometers long. They pass magnets, accelerating cavities, thousands of different bits of electronics that need to be precisely synchronized. synchronized to do exactly what they need to do when the particle flies through it. So we need to synchronize clocks in electronics with a precision much better than the nanosecond, better even going down to the picosecond. And the WideRabbit technology is a perfect example for why open research, open collaboration, creating an ecosystem is so important to create resilience because then when you look at WideRabbit, when you look at where else do you need to perfectly synchronize things, well, you could look at financial trading, the German Stock Exchange, the Frankfurt de Börse uses WideRabbit to synchronize buy and sales orders. But if you think about power grids, there is also a need to synchronize clocks in the distributed power grid to maintain synchronization in your power grid and avoid precisely the grid not functioning as expected. Which has happened a bit recently, I think of the outages in Spain and Portugal, for example. In my limited understanding of what happened, that’s exactly one of the reasons. I’m not saying that WideRabbit would have prevented it, but at some point you start looking at all the little building blocks, at all the enabling technologies that you need to get right to get the complex infrastructures that we have today to work and also to provide somewhere this common base, talk about standardization, that you would need.

Mike Mullane: Thanks very much, Martin. If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to put your hand up, interrupt if I don’t notice you. This is supposed to be an interactive session, so to make it interactive, we really need to hear your voices. Don’t be shy. Any news from Ian? No. Let’s have another quick round, going back to Ellen Ng. What sort of gaps are you noticing in terms of aligning? Disaster Risk Reduction and Infrastructure Development.

Helen Ng: So one of the biggest gaps that we have noticed is that when we do speak with governments about what is resilience, and I think you asked this question earlier, what is resilience, what is resilient infrastructure, there is different common understandings of what this is, and there is usually not a clear understanding of what is resilience and what is resilient infrastructure, or they might have an understanding of what is resilience, but then not really knowing what does resilient infrastructure mean, because to many of these countries, it’s a very relatively new term. So instead of coming up with a definition, we’ve decided, you know, I’ve been, I worked in standardization for many years, and I remember sitting in rooms where we’ve discussed for hours and hours going around in circles and circles of what does resilience mean, what does sustainable development mean. So instead of coming up with, you know, definitions, we decided to develop a set of principles for resilient infrastructure with some key actions that help governments to really concretely understand what is resilient infrastructure. So that’s one of the gaps. Another one is considering the wide range of hazards. So we know that the frequency of events and hazard events are increasing. It’s more severe these days, and infrastructure, it needs to be built to consider not only one specific hazard, but multi-hazards, and this needs to be taken into consideration in the designs. So many of the, especially the small island development states, you know, they don’t have the luxury of bouncing back or, you know, recovering. So it’s just, they’re always stuck in this cycle of, I remember one colleague, he explained to me, it’s like you’re, it’s like you’re in a way, if you’re constantly being hit by something, you don’t have time to recover. So it’s really important for them to invest in this resilient infrastructure. So it’s important that at the design phase that all the hazards are taken into consideration. And then also understanding the interdependencies. So a lot of times the infrastructure systems and of course the way the infrastructure is developed and also the way our government is set up is very siloed. So there it doesn’t allow for the understanding of all the different interdependencies across the infrastructure assets and systems. And of course, this is what Martine was talking about, is that when there is one failure, it cascades into many different impacts. So it’s not just, and this is why this cross collaboration is so needed. It’s really to help each other understand what is the interdependencies, where are the vulnerabilities of these systems. And also another issue is the short-term thinking. So often when we make the case, it’s really hard to make the case for investing in resilient infrastructure because you’re investing in something that may never happen. So for politicians, it’s really difficult for them to say, I’m going to put this money into something when they’re just going for votes. And it’s this short-term thinking that’s really causing challenges. And then also, of course, the budget constraints that governments face. So not only is it difficult to convince them to invest in resilient infrastructure, but it’s also really difficult for them to mobilize resources, but also make, prioritize where the investments go. So this creates, of course, the vicious cycle of disaster response, recover, repeat. So this is what we’re trying to do is to help invest in prevention to break this vicious cycle.

Mike Mullane: Thanks. And I think there are a lot of questions there, if those of you are listening. We, in an ideal world, we would design things to be resilient or redesign or knock them down and build them again to be resilient. But in the real world, we actually have security by design isn’t always possible because we have a lot of legacy equipment out there. How do you confront that problem?

Maarten Botterman: I think that’s a fair point. If we’ve got an internet with standards that are serving five and a half billion users or more, how do we change that? We shouldn’t change that overnight, every night. That needs to become an evolution, because there’s a lot of installed base that serves that. We’ve seen that when the internet became big in the early 2000s, when we moved from IPv4. We said, this is not good enough anymore, because the addresses will be gone at some moment. So IPv6 was introduced. And the early introductions were difficult, because the hardware couldn’t handle it. It required more memory. Very practical. I’m not a technical person, but I see the issue. Today, not a problem anymore. So if you give time, and if you start planning for that, you’ll get there. We saw the technical community starting to think in terms of how do we make sure that we can deal with larger memory blocks and things like that. Now, I think we see this with the internet as well. It’s based on standards like BGP, the Internet Protocol, and all these things that come from a past where the connections were different. Where, originally, everybody knew each other. Not true anymore. So we’re hardening that. At ICANN, there’s a big initiative on what is called DNSSEC. So we can ensure that the integrity of the origin is really there. Where do you connect to? We see in the routing, we see protocols like the RPKI, policies like ROA. We see in email, we see next to standards, more and more standards, including now DMARC, on policies of how do you deal with standards to strengthen this root, this core internet more and more, so we can rely on it more and more. Is it perfect? No, but it helps. And it also means that organizations need to be aware of how to do these standards. This is where you see that multi-stakeholder is so important. Governments also have a role. For instance, in the Netherlands, and I’m sure there’s plenty of other examples, the Dutch government is expecting from its agencies to adapt certain secure standards or explain why they can’t. And with that, they lead society in that change. They lead service providers to offer these services. And in that way, we see more and more strengthening. So I think it’s really important to promote investment in risk mitigation built in redundancy. I mean, internet routing, there are certain independent routing operators, but there’s about a couple of thousands of instances of these routers. So we prevent a single point of failing. A couple of these could run the whole internet all by themselves now. But the internet has become so important that it’s good that together they can absorb attacks, absorb higher need. An example that we are on that way, I think we saw when COVID hit the world, and the internet continued to function. But we need to continue to build on that. And we need to continue to work on the resilience. What happens on the internet is the next challenge. Information integrity, privacy, all that kind of abuse. But the internet, we need to make sure that it starts there. And for that, of course, we need to have a resilient backbone. We need to have a smart grid that functions as it should. Including access to energy. And that means For instance, C cables are very important for traffic. And there’s multiple C cables and people map them. But now what happens if you put an extra C cable in, so you have more diversity, it’s laid by those C cable layers. And in some parts of the sea, the route is so the same, through the same hole in the sea bottom, I don’t. So it’s things of that, that we really need to consider all these aspects for electricity, for information streams, and keep that going.

Mike Mullane: Benjamin, CERN has this incredible track record of developing real world applications for emerging tech. What are the challenges?

Benjamin Frisch: Well, the challenges that we have at CERN is that we tend to design things that we’re going to operate in 10 or 15 years from now. If you think about the Large Hadron Collider we’re operating now, the initial design phrase was in 1994 for a machine expected to start originally in 2004 and then start in 2008. For those of you who are following what we’re discussing now, which is the future of particle physics, we discuss a project called the Future Circular Collider that would start operating earliest in 2047. And you have a project plan that goes until the late 2090s. So we’re talking about something that is going to run very far down the road, which means you need to create, and that’s where it resonates, you need to future proof your design. You need something that is going to run for a long time. You need to make it resilient and you need to build the right community. So the challenge that you need to overcome, precisely, is how do you create, how do you do real open science, open development? How do you create real openness? in a community, but also not just in the academic community. We also need industry to work with. So how do you create open collaboration in industry? How do you get actual competitors to agree on a certain number of basic technological parameters? So part of what we want to do is also, well, creating this open ecosystem and in order to get there, you also need to create exchange. You need to get people to discuss with each other. You need to create a common toolbox and a common understanding of what does industry need? What does academia need? How do we work together? How can we in science benefit from technological developments? But at the same time, also, how can the developments that we do be useful to society in different applications? And coming back to the example of White Rabbit, we developed a technology interesting for us. We started to see that that is interesting for the societal applications, energy, telecommunications, finances. From the beginning, it was very clear that we would release that specific technology. So that’s hardware and software under an open source license to facilitate access. Then we saw that that started creating traction, that we started to have a community revolving around it. We engaged with a number of standard-making bodies. White Rabbit became an extension of an IEEE standard. Took 10 years to get there, but it’s now the case. We now have a collaboration of academic institutes, hardware vendors, and end users that work together on deciding how White Rabbit should evolve to answer the challenges of future networks. And we’re talking with power grids. We start to see interesting people working on quantum computing. So one thing is time synchronization in current telecommunications, there you don’t need wide rabbit. But once you start thinking about quantum communications, you will need something a lot more precise than what’s available today. So really, challenges to overcome is, it’s really community creation, and you could think about different examples too, but it resonates a lot what I hear from Helen and Martin.

Mike Mullane: Yeah, and of course, quantum is going to bring a lot of other challenges in terms of resilience as well. I came in wearing an SDG badge, I noticed somebody else had some SDG colours. And it just occurred to me that we talk a lot about, today we’re discussing resilience and we talk a lot about sustainability. To what extent are these two words becoming synonyms? And maybe I could start with you, Helen.

Helen Ng: Yeah, so as I mentioned, we used to have these debates about what is resilience in the standards development process, and what is sustainable development? And they’re saying, can you have, and what is smart cities? Because this was all in the context of the smart cities work I was doing. And so often, what the conversations really led back to was that it all comes back to sustainable development. So resilience and smart cities are really enablers for sustainable development, or others can say that, you know, sustainable development and resilience are one of the same. So we need to be resilient, and we need to invest in resilient infrastructure in order to safeguard our development gains. So if we, you know, for countries to achieve the sustainable development goals, it doesn’t make sense if they do not integrate resilience into everything they do.

Mike Mullane: I’ve just noticed Kishore Narang, a good friend, and very active in the IEC’s smart city work. I was going to ask you, Kishore, the same question. To what extent are sustainability… and resilience the same thing?

Kishor Narang: No I think resilience is a subset of the sustainability paradigm not a complimentary because without being resilient you can’t be sustainable. Okay so it is one part of like even people talk about in context of circularity I say circularity is a subset of this thing without being circular without being resilient a city and infrastructure cannot be sustainable so that is from the short answer to this.

Mike Mullane: Thank you very much and the same question to Martin.

Maarten Botterman: Yeah well there’s two things sustainability can’t happen without the internet either I believe because we need the sensors out there we need to know what’s going on we need to exchange experiences but when we build on the internet and further innovate it’s essential that we take into account the the footprint the energy footprint of that and I think we’re increasingly conscious of that. I would say in the 2000 to 2010s privacy and security was the hot topic now it’s also to see how we can do it in a sustainable way. Awareness of the fact that AI is really using a lot of energy right now when generally used but we use it let’s make sure that we come to solutions where we don’t burn up the world in that that’s essential. I think it’s also crucial for infrastructures to be resilient the more natural disasters we have the more difficult that is and in terms of energy provision I think we will move towards a time where energy harvesting that has been development over ages. You see it already in French highways next to the public points where they collect the energy themselves. I think building in that and having more energy on location is one of those elements that will help to make sure that the way we design the future will become more resilient. You inspired me sir.

Kishor Narang: I think this is something which I’ve been very close to my heart. So in India I’ve been leading the smart city sanitization and one other thing that we realized in 2015 when our Prime Minister announced that you know 100 smart city pilots and people are wondering why 100 cities for pilots and I used to it was a difficult thing that we have 8000 kind of cities that are looking forward to learning from these lessons but anyway having said that what we had realized in Europe and developed nations when they started talking about smart cities they realized that they already had all the utilities are mostly smart. They had a lot of data so what they had to do only put a digital layer on the top collect data because but it was since it was not interoperable write some interworking proxies cloud connectors and provide a citizen dashboard cities are smart. In India our utilities were not smart even that time in 2015 and just electricity was still trying to get smart so we had a choice that whether we go the same way we make each utility everyone smart and then we go city. I said no it’s a chance to leapfrog and one thing which I realized we were being a financially constrained nation we were very conscious about the funding. In a city if you see there are five six utilities and there are five six more the citizen service agencies which set up an individual siloed digital infrastructure across city and which again converged now to give a unified dashboard. It didn’t look funny and it looked okay to me because in the same geography why do we have parallel infrastructure so we came up I personally was very conscious we came up with a unified digital infrastructure reference architecture for all civic and critical infrastructure we have one common ICT backbone all they with private and business they can do anything whatever they want. But for civic and critical, we came up with one. And the basic motivation was this thing. And the key takeaways are, OK, you save on capital expenditure. You save on operation. But the two key, my personal motivation was, instead of 10 different ICT network in the same city, now I have one well-architected. So the carbon footprint goes down drastically. Second thing, now with a well-architected one infrastructure, I can make it. It’s very easy to make it more cyber-secure and cyber-resilient. So that was one of the two key takeaways. But talking about AI, AI is really a carbon energy guzzler. And I think in OSS, I wrote a think piece. Is AI the new plastic in 21, 22? But I’m happy now people have started taking care, listening to these things. But these are narratives which we need to really make more visible. Still, AI ecosystem is still not listening to the sustainability aspect, if you really ask me.

Maarten Botterman: Mike, if you allow me, a very short one on this. First point, people think sustainable means more expensive. That is not necessarily so. And on the long run, not for sure. But even on the shorter run, you will already stop wasting things that are not needed. The other thing is leapfrogging. Thank you for mentioning that. If you talk only about US, Western Europe, it’s a totally different story if you look globally. And then there’s so much opportunity for leapfrogging because every problem we have somewhere is already solved somewhere else.

Mike Mullane: You mentioned this sort of people being afraid of blowing the world up. And that made me think of our friends at CERN. And Benjamin, you mentioned the Large Hadron Collider. And I remember there was this crazy conspiracy theory back in 2005, 2006 that when this thing went online, it was going to suck us all into a black hole. My question is, to what extent sustainability is important? to CERN. You’ve spoken about resilience, but is sustainability part of the equation for you guys as well?

Benjamin Frisch: It is. It is. I really like your introductions. I was waiting for what’s actually going to come as a question at the end of it. Sustainability clearly is part of it. It has become more and more important to understand what impact, what carbon impact we have in science. And in particular, when you think about what I mentioned before, when you think about designing machines that are going to operate for the next century, you need to think about the impact that you will have. And that has become one of the key elements in our operation. It is a reduction of electricity consumption. It is a reduction of any pollutants that you might find. Well, because simply that’s what you were using when you were designing these machines 50 years ago. And it’s also about thinking what impact would it actually have both locally and globally if you design a new machine that will operate in the long term. And, I mean, there’s a bit of another aspect that I also wanted to mention because it didn’t come up yet that much, which is really sharing the knowledge that you create and then the training and educational aspects that you need to create, on one hand, the understanding for the need of creating resilient systems in an approach towards sustainability, but also educating those who design systems towards these criteria, but also those who will be users towards understanding what they are actually working with. When we talk about artificial intelligence, about generative AI, it is a tool that can be very powerful, but you need to create the understanding. You need to educate the user to know exactly what they’re doing there. For us it is extremely important to train generations of engineers and of scientists because they will be working with technologies that at least at CERN will be around for a very long time. And I think it’s also part, whenever you get into a discussion about how can technology support a development, well the technology can be the best there is, if you do not train the users towards understanding what it actually does, what impact it will have, then you might deploy the best technology, but it will not lead to the effects that you want to see.

Mike Mullane: I’m glad you mentioned generative AI. I’m involved in a project about AI and multimedia authentication. You think of things like deep fakes that are really undermining society and creating all sorts of risks for society. And the aim of this project really is to restore trust in media, to enable people to know the provenance of content, not to stifle creativity, but to tell people if something has been created by an AI or by an individual and provide some context around how that content has been developed. That’s an important topic. And if any of you are around on Friday, we’ll be talking about it for most of the day, different aspects related to regulation and governance, which I know is a topic of interest to many of you here, but also a look at the standardisation landscape. And again, this all goes to resilience. This is about making society more resilient. This is about making our institutions more resilient. Which brings me to my next question. And this project is a collaboration between different sorts of organisations. Standards Development Organizations, Big Tech, Academia, Civil Society. For your organizations, how important are partnerships and collaborations? Let me start with CERN.

Benjamin Frisch: They are key. We wouldn’t be able to do it without that. When we talk about CERN, really the four pillars of CERN are the science, I mean that is our fundamental mission, the technologies that we need to develop, the educational aspect, and the collaboration, and that’s collaboration with academia and collaboration with industry, and increasingly also collaboration with civil society, so there is also a training aspect. CERN is an international organization. Our member states are mostly European, but not only. We have about 30 member states and associate member states today. But we do host scientists from almost all across the globe, independent of whether they come from member states or non-member states, so we are really a lab which is open to the world, which means we do collaborate with many countries, with many institutes. At the same time, we cannot build all the things that we need, so we need to work with industry. We need the collaboration to start with for capacity building, and that’s where you start at capacity building in the civil society. Capacity building starts at the primary school. It starts with basic education. It starts with CERN hosting teenagers, just coming to visit to see how practical applications of your basic math course that you have at school, and then it goes on with hosting students, early career researchers, young professionals, and coming here, bringing their knowledge, their way of solving things, adding that little brick to what we do. and taking ideas back home. So it’s really that collaboration even with individuals, collaboration on an individual basis, and then indeed the formal collaboration, again, as I said before, with universities, with industry, and with countries, both member states, associate member states, and non-member state countries.

Mike Mullane: Thank you. Helen and Martin, but first, a question from over here. Sorry, I didn’t see you.

Audience: Thank you very much. I just wanted to come back very quickly on the previous point that you made about sustainable goals, development goals and infrastructure. And maybe from the point of view of a registry of domain names, AFNIC, that is in a way part of ICANN. Just two more things. We have to take into account the planet boundaries and the planet limits, which means that there are a lot of things that, we talk about energy, we talk about a lot of things, but we should talk also about the chips, about the computers, about the basic things that you need to run an infrastructure. And maybe also we should talk about the data center. When we put the infrastructure, and the more we see AI, for instance, but also the restriction of access to these kinds of products because of the planet limit, the more it is dangerous for the infrastructure because the money is not there. The money is somewhere else. It’s in AI, it’s in the added value product, and that’s fair. But if you don’t think about guaranteeing a minimum of finance or a minimum of supply to those who are operating the infrastructure, everything could collapse. So this is something to take into account. Make sure that there is a stable supply to the infrastructure operators. And I’m not talking only about energy. Thank you.

Mike Mullane: Thanks for that. And this is, as you say, this is such a huge topic that 45 minutes does not begin to do it justice. And one of the things we’ve done is set up a little WhatsApp group so that hopefully we can continue this conversation afterwards. And if any of you are interested in joining a wider conversation, we’d be very happy to look into setting up some other kind of platform where we can exchange ideas and possibly meet up as well. My email is really super easy to remember. So if you are interested, drop me a line. It’s mmu.iec.ch. And to wrap up, Martin and Helen, that question about the importance of collaboration and partnerships.

Maarten Botterman: It’s funny. In a way, Pierre gave one of the answers. Capacity development happens on different levels. One of the things I’m very enthusiastic about myself is helping Internet Society and ICANN to train the young new people that are eager to come in. Because if you don’t train them, we need that new blood. We need that new view as well into the further development of where we are. Then I’ve talked, I had, in fact, from India, but also from the Netherlands, two different professors approaching me, like, can’t we set up a kind of curriculum at the university for people where they really have an integrative course on Internet governance and not only on the technologies to really build that capacity there? And then the last thing, to keep it short because I can talk much longer, is that one of the things I really love doing is I work also with the Global Forum for Cyber Expertise, which we call the Triple I Workshop Internet Infrastructure Initiative, where we take global knowledge to regional events, where in the regional event we have multi-stakeholder around the table with their expertise, listening to global expertise, bringing it together. First section is about what standards could you benefit from. Second standard section is good practice examples like that, like DDoS mitigation methods like other. And the third section is about local action plans, because the real most effective action is organized by the people from that region with all the knowledge and input they need. So I would plead for these three investments in capacity building.

Helen Ng: Helen? I’ll be quick, I know we’re running out of time, but so besides the work that we do on resilient infrastructure, in general UNDRR is a small organization, so we depend on partnerships. Since the implementation of the Sendai Framework requires an all-of-society approach, partnerships is really important in everything we do. So we are known for our convening power, so bringing together the member states, bringing together the different partners, academia, the different UN organizations. So it’s also about interagency collaboration within the UN, making sure that we’re not duplicating efforts, but also going into it with a joint approach, so that for our member states, they’re not getting different strategies, different ideas. And of course, this is why partnerships are so important, so that we can do it jointly to avoid duplication of efforts and to provide the best technical expertise that we can give our member states. But I think just to speak to I guess what I’ve heard recently and I think and this is something I think about is also when we support, you know, the Developing countries and thinking about standards a lot of times standards take a long time to develop and I know It’s it’s in a process that engages, you know different Different stakeholders and you Benjamin you said one standard took you 10 years. So how do we? The issue with that is that things change so fast So, what are you telling in terms of when you’re giving advice on standards which standards to use? How do we prevent it from being outdated by the second it gets published?

Mike Mullane: Maybe that’s when I can answer really really quickly So standards usually don’t take 10 years to develop We’re talking about two to two to three years and and the reason they take three years is because they’re about consensus at least those international standards are and unless people buy into them, then they’re not going to have any any impact and We don’t only produce Standards ISO doesn’t only produce standards We also produce technical specifications as well Which are much faster to push out and we can wait for those to turn into standards We also try to anticipate work. So for example, we’re already working in in areas like biodigital convergence and And quantum so when these become pressing pressing issues the standards are already beginning to flow in that’s a very quick answer and My regret is we only had 45 minutes and this is such a huge topic so much more to discuss Hopefully we get a second chance and more time But thank you all very much for listening and thank you panel for participating. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation

Agreement points

Collaboration and partnerships are essential for building resilient systems

Speakers

– Mike Mullane
– Maarten Botterman
– Helen Ng
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Cross-sectoral collaboration necessary because no single actor can make society resilient alone

Internet infrastructure requires proactive investment and cross-sectoral collaboration due to societal dependence

Multi-stakeholder approach essential with government, academia, industry, and civil society involvement

International collaboration across member states and open global participation crucial for scientific advancement

Summary

All speakers emphasized that resilience cannot be achieved by individual organizations working in isolation. They consistently argued for multi-stakeholder approaches involving government, academia, industry, and civil society to address complex resilience challenges.

Topics

Infrastructure | Development | Capacity development

Resilience requires both prevention and recovery capabilities

Speakers

– Mike Mullane
– Maarten Botterman
– Helen Ng

Arguments

Resilience means ability to rebound and come back from disasters, with emphasis on recovery and continuity

Resilience is foundational necessity for critical infrastructure that society depends on, requiring both prevention and quick recovery

Multi-hazard considerations, interdependency understanding, short-term political thinking, and budget constraints create barriers

Summary

Speakers agreed that effective resilience involves both designing systems to prevent failures and ensuring rapid recovery when failures occur. This dual approach is essential for critical infrastructure that society depends upon.

Topics

Infrastructure | Critical internet resources

Sustainability and resilience are interconnected concepts

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Helen Ng
– Kishor Narang
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Internet development must consider energy footprint and sustainable practices alongside resilience requirements

Resilience and sustainability are interconnected, with resilient infrastructure needed to safeguard development gains

Resilience is a subset of sustainability paradigm – cannot be sustainable without being resilient

Long-term machine design requires consideration of carbon impact and environmental sustainability

Summary

All speakers recognized that sustainability and resilience are not separate concepts but are fundamentally interconnected. They agreed that long-term resilient systems must consider environmental impact and energy consumption.

Topics

Infrastructure | Sustainable development

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized that building resilient systems requires long-term thinking and gradual evolution rather than sudden changes. They both highlighted the importance of open collaboration and community building in developing standards and technologies that will operate for extended periods.

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Legacy systems require evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes, with standards development taking time but enabling gradual improvement

Future-proofing designs for decades-long operation requires open collaboration and community building across sectors

Topics

Infrastructure | Digital standards

Both speakers identified siloed approaches as a major barrier to resilience. They emphasized the need to understand interdependencies across systems and move away from fragmented infrastructure development toward more integrated approaches.

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Kishor Narang

Arguments

Multi-hazard considerations, interdependency understanding, short-term political thinking, and budget constraints create barriers

Unified digital infrastructure approach reduces carbon footprint and improves cyber-security compared to siloed systems

Topics

Infrastructure | Sustainable development | Cybersecurity

Both speakers emphasized the critical importance of human capacity building and education across multiple levels, from basic education to professional development. They both highlighted the need for international collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Capacity building through training and education at multiple levels from primary school to professional development

International collaboration across member states and open global participation crucial for scientific advancement

Topics

Development | Capacity development

Unexpected consensus

AI as both enabler and threat to sustainability

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Kishor Narang

Arguments

Internet development must consider energy footprint and sustainable practices alongside resilience requirements

AI presents both opportunities and challenges as energy-intensive technology requiring sustainability considerations

Explanation

Despite coming from different sectors (internet governance and smart cities), both speakers unexpectedly converged on concerns about AI’s energy consumption. This consensus is significant as it shows cross-sectoral awareness of AI’s environmental impact emerging as a critical consideration for resilient and sustainable infrastructure development.

Topics

Infrastructure | Sustainable development

Standards development timing challenges

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Mike Mullane

Arguments

Standards development speed versus rapid technological change creates challenges for developing countries seeking guidance

Standards development balances consensus-building time requirements with need for rapid technological adaptation

Explanation

An unexpected consensus emerged around the tension between the time needed for proper standards development and the rapid pace of technological change. This is significant as it highlights a fundamental challenge in governance and standardization that affects both disaster risk reduction and technology development sectors.

Topics

Infrastructure | Digital standards | Development

Overall assessment

Summary

The speakers demonstrated strong consensus on fundamental principles of resilience, particularly the need for collaborative approaches, the interconnection between sustainability and resilience, and the importance of both prevention and recovery capabilities. There was also agreement on the challenges posed by siloed thinking and the need for capacity building.

Consensus level

High level of consensus with significant implications for policy and practice. The agreement across diverse sectors (UN disaster reduction, internet governance, research institutions, and smart cities) suggests these principles are universally applicable. This consensus provides a strong foundation for developing integrated approaches to resilience that can address complex, interconnected challenges facing modern society.

Different viewpoints

Relationship between sustainability and resilience

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Kishor Narang

Arguments

Resilience and smart cities are really enablers for sustainable development, or others can say that, you know, sustainable development and resilience are one of the same

Resilience is a subset of sustainability paradigm – cannot be sustainable without being resilient

Summary

Helen Ng presents resilience as either an enabler for sustainable development or equivalent to it, suggesting they could be the same thing. Kishor Narang definitively argues that resilience is a subset of sustainability, not complementary or equivalent, emphasizing that sustainability cannot exist without resilience as a foundational requirement.

Topics

Infrastructure | Sustainable development

Standards development timeframes and adaptation speed

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Mike Mullane

Arguments

Standards development speed versus rapid technological change creates challenges for developing countries seeking guidance

Standards development balances consensus-building time requirements with need for rapid technological adaptation

Summary

Helen Ng expresses concern about standards taking too long to develop (citing 10-year examples) while technology changes rapidly, creating challenges for developing countries. Mike Mullane defends the current approach, explaining that standards typically take 2-3 years for consensus-building and that organizations also produce faster technical specifications while anticipating future needs.

Topics

Infrastructure | Digital standards | Development

Unexpected differences

Definitional approach to resilience concepts

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Mike Mullane

Arguments

Different governments have varying understandings of what resilience means, creating need for common principles rather than definitions

Resilience means ability to rebound and come back from disasters, with emphasis on recovery and continuity

Explanation

This disagreement is unexpected because both speakers work in international standardization contexts where clear definitions are typically valued. Helen advocates for avoiding definitional debates in favor of practical principles, while Mike provides a clear etymological definition. This suggests different philosophical approaches to addressing conceptual ambiguity in international cooperation.

Topics

Infrastructure | Development

Overall assessment

Summary

The discussion showed relatively low levels of fundamental disagreement, with most differences being methodological rather than philosophical. Main areas of disagreement included the hierarchical relationship between sustainability and resilience concepts, and the appropriate balance between standards development rigor and speed of technological adaptation.

Disagreement level

Low to moderate disagreement level. The speakers generally shared common goals around building resilient infrastructure and systems, but differed on specific approaches, timelines, and conceptual frameworks. These disagreements reflect different organizational perspectives and operational contexts rather than fundamental conflicts, suggesting good potential for collaborative solutions that incorporate multiple viewpoints.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized that building resilient systems requires long-term thinking and gradual evolution rather than sudden changes. They both highlighted the importance of open collaboration and community building in developing standards and technologies that will operate for extended periods.

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Legacy systems require evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes, with standards development taking time but enabling gradual improvement

Future-proofing designs for decades-long operation requires open collaboration and community building across sectors

Topics

Infrastructure | Digital standards

Both speakers identified siloed approaches as a major barrier to resilience. They emphasized the need to understand interdependencies across systems and move away from fragmented infrastructure development toward more integrated approaches.

Speakers

– Helen Ng
– Kishor Narang

Arguments

Multi-hazard considerations, interdependency understanding, short-term political thinking, and budget constraints create barriers

Unified digital infrastructure approach reduces carbon footprint and improves cyber-security compared to siloed systems

Topics

Infrastructure | Sustainable development | Cybersecurity

Both speakers emphasized the critical importance of human capacity building and education across multiple levels, from basic education to professional development. They both highlighted the need for international collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Speakers

– Maarten Botterman
– Benjamin Frisch

Arguments

Capacity building through training and education at multiple levels from primary school to professional development

International collaboration across member states and open global participation crucial for scientific advancement

Topics

Development | Capacity development

Key takeaways

Resilience requires both prevention (designing systems to withstand disruption) and recovery capabilities (bouncing back quickly from failures)

Cross-sectoral collaboration is essential because infrastructure systems are interdependent – failure in one sector cascades to others

Resilience and sustainability are interconnected concepts, with resilience being a subset of sustainability that enables long-term development

Legacy systems present challenges but can be evolved gradually through standards development and proactive investment rather than complete replacement

Open collaboration and ecosystem creation are crucial for developing technologies that serve broader societal needs beyond their original purpose

Capacity building and education at multiple levels (from primary school to professional development) are fundamental to building resilient systems

Multi-stakeholder partnerships involving government, academia, industry, and civil society are necessary for effective resilience implementation

Standards development must balance consensus-building time requirements with the need to adapt to rapidly changing technology

Resolutions and action items

Mike Mullane proposed setting up a WhatsApp group to continue the conversation after the session

Invitation extended for participants to join a wider conversation platform for ongoing idea exchange and potential future meetings

Contact information provided (mmu.iec.ch) for those interested in continued collaboration

Mention of a follow-up session on Friday focusing on AI and multimedia authentication project

Unresolved issues

How to prevent standards from becoming outdated by the time they are published given rapid technological change

How to ensure stable supply and financing for infrastructure operators as resources shift to higher-value applications like AI

How to effectively balance the energy consumption of AI systems with sustainability goals

How to overcome short-term political thinking that prevents investment in long-term resilience infrastructure

How to create common understanding of resilience definitions across different governments and organizations

How to address the challenge that developing countries face in choosing which standards to implement given long development cycles

Suggested compromises

Developing principles for resilient infrastructure rather than attempting to create universal definitions that lead to circular debates

Using evolutionary rather than revolutionary approaches to upgrade legacy systems over time

Implementing technical specifications as faster alternatives while waiting for full standards development

Creating unified digital infrastructure for civic and critical services while allowing private sector flexibility

Focusing on regional action plans that combine global expertise with local knowledge and implementation capacity

We’ve become so dependent on the internet that when the power goes out, or the roads are blocked, or a mobile doesn’t work, everything else stops. And it’s no longer a technical luxury, but a societal necessity.

Speaker

Maarten Botterman

Reason

This comment reframes resilience from a technical problem to a societal imperative. It highlights the fundamental shift in how we must approach infrastructure – moving from ‘time to market’ thinking to ‘reliability first’ thinking because society now depends on these systems for basic functioning.

Impact

This observation set the tone for the entire discussion by establishing that resilience isn’t optional anymore – it’s existential. It led other speakers to discuss cross-sectoral dependencies and influenced the conversation toward viewing resilience as foundational rather than supplementary.

So many of the, especially the small island development states, you know, they don’t have the luxury of bouncing back or, you know, recovering. So it’s just, they’re always stuck in this cycle of… it’s like you’re in a way, if you’re constantly being hit by something, you don’t have time to recover.

Speaker

Helen Ng

Reason

This comment powerfully illustrates the inequality in resilience capacity and challenges the Western-centric view of ‘bouncing back.’ It reveals that for some communities, the traditional definition of resilience (recovery after disaster) is inadequate – they need prevention-focused approaches.

Impact

This shifted the discussion from theoretical resilience concepts to real-world constraints and equity issues. It influenced subsequent conversations about the importance of designing resilience into systems from the start, rather than relying on post-disaster recovery.

In India our utilities were not smart even that time in 2015… we had a choice that whether we go the same way we make each utility everyone smart and then we go city. I said no it’s a chance to leapfrog… instead of 10 different ICT network in the same city, now I have one well-architected.

Speaker

Kishor Narang

Reason

This comment introduces the powerful concept of leapfrogging as a resilience strategy. It demonstrates how constraints can become opportunities for more resilient design, and challenges the assumption that developed nations’ approaches are the only model.

Impact

This comment energized the discussion and prompted Maarten to emphasize leapfrogging opportunities globally. It shifted the conversation from viewing developing nations as behind to seeing them as potentially ahead in resilient design approaches.

We design things that we’re going to operate in 10 or 15 years from now… we discuss a project called the Future Circular Collider that would start operating earliest in 2047. And you have a project plan that goes until the late 2090s.

Speaker

Benjamin Frisch

Reason

This comment introduces an entirely different temporal dimension to resilience thinking. While others discuss immediate challenges, CERN operates on generational timescales, requiring fundamentally different approaches to future-proofing and community building.

Impact

This expanded the discussion’s time horizon and influenced conversations about long-term sustainability and the importance of open collaboration. It demonstrated that true resilience requires thinking beyond typical planning cycles.

Is AI the new plastic in 21, 22?… AI is really a carbon energy guzzler… Still, AI ecosystem is still not listening to the sustainability aspect.

Speaker

Kishor Narang

Reason

This provocative analogy challenges the uncritical adoption of AI by comparing it to plastic – initially seen as revolutionary but later recognized as environmentally destructive. It forces consideration of AI’s hidden costs to resilience and sustainability.

Impact

This comment introduced a critical perspective on AI that influenced the subsequent discussion about the need to balance technological advancement with environmental responsibility. It connected the dots between AI adoption and infrastructure resilience challenges.

If you don’t think about guaranteeing a minimum of finance or a minimum of supply to those who are operating the infrastructure, everything could collapse… Make sure that there is a stable supply to the infrastructure operators.

Speaker

Audience member from AFNIC

Reason

This comment identifies a critical but often overlooked aspect of resilience – the economic sustainability of infrastructure operators. It highlights how market forces directing money toward ‘sexy’ applications like AI could undermine basic infrastructure resilience.

Impact

This intervention near the end of the discussion added an important economic dimension that hadn’t been fully explored. It emphasized that resilience isn’t just technical but requires sustainable business models for infrastructure operators.

Overall assessment

These key comments collectively transformed what could have been a technical discussion about resilience into a nuanced exploration of systemic, temporal, and equity dimensions. The conversation evolved from defining resilience to understanding its societal implications, from Western-centric approaches to global perspectives including leapfrogging opportunities, and from short-term fixes to generational thinking. The comments created a progression that moved beyond traditional disaster recovery concepts to encompass prevention, sustainability, and the complex interdependencies of modern infrastructure. Most importantly, they established that resilience is not just about technical robustness but about social equity, economic sustainability, and long-term thinking – making the discussion far more comprehensive and actionable than a purely technical treatment would have been.

How do you go about ensuring that your strategies are as inclusive as possible?

Speaker

Mike Mullane

Explanation

This question was directed to Helen Ng about UNDRR’s approach to inclusivity in disaster risk reduction strategies, indicating a need to understand best practices for stakeholder engagement.

How do you confront the problem of legacy equipment when security by design isn’t always possible?

Speaker

Mike Mullane

Explanation

This addresses the practical challenge of implementing resilience measures in existing infrastructure that wasn’t originally designed with modern security and resilience principles.

To what extent are sustainability and resilience becoming synonyms?

Speaker

Mike Mullane

Explanation

This explores the conceptual relationship between two key development paradigms and their practical implications for policy and implementation.

How do we prevent standards from being outdated by the time they get published, given that things change so fast?

Speaker

Helen Ng

Explanation

This addresses the challenge of keeping standardization processes relevant in rapidly evolving technological and policy environments, particularly important for developing countries seeking guidance.

How can we make sure we always roll, and if there’s a hiccup, that we roll very quickly again?

Speaker

Maarten Botterman

Explanation

This relates to the Marconi Society’s focus on continuous operation and rapid recovery of critical infrastructure systems.

How do you create real open science and open development, and get actual competitors to agree on basic technological parameters?

Speaker

Benjamin Frisch

Explanation

This addresses the challenge of fostering collaboration in competitive environments to develop shared technological foundations for resilient systems.

How do we guarantee a minimum of finance or supply to infrastructure operators when money flows to higher value-added products like AI?

Speaker

Audience member (Pierre from AFNIC)

Explanation

This highlights the economic sustainability challenge of maintaining basic infrastructure when investment flows toward more profitable technologies.

How can we set up integrative university curricula on Internet governance that goes beyond just technologies?

Speaker

Professors from India and Netherlands (mentioned by Maarten Botterman)

Explanation

This addresses the need for comprehensive education that combines technical knowledge with governance understanding for future infrastructure professionals.

How do we create exchange and common understanding between industry and academia for mutual benefit?

Speaker

Benjamin Frisch

Explanation

This explores the mechanisms needed to facilitate knowledge transfer and collaboration between different sectors working on resilient infrastructure.