AI and Digital Twins: Enabling Targeted Investments for Resilient Infrastructure in the 21st Century
In a world where extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, the importance of resilient infrastructure cannot be overstated. Lifeline infrastructure systems, which provide essential services like water, electricity, and transportation, are often taken for granted until they fail. However, factors such as age, deferred maintenance, and more frequent extreme weather events are putting these structures under increasing stress.
At the Building Innovation 2025 conference, sponsored by the National Institute of Building Sciences, experts emphasized the need for strategic planning for disaster recovery. Much of the country’s infrastructure was built before the notions of redundancy and resiliency were understood, and recent climate-driven disasters such as Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles wildfires have underscored how critical these systems are.
North Carolina DOT Secretary Joey Hopkins highlighted that much of our infrastructure is so old that it was built to standards that we no longer use. For example, in the 1960s, ramps were built on the left side of highways with very short acceleration and deceleration lanes. Vehicles were smaller and slower back then, but things have changed. This lack of modernization has left our infrastructure vulnerable to the same forces that caused damage in the first place.
Madhu Beriwal, founder and chair of IEM International, a disaster preparedness consultancy based in Raleigh, North Carolina, pointed out that U.S. funding programs for disaster recovery only provide money to restore structures to their previous state, leaving them vulnerable to the same forces that caused damage. She emphasized that infrastructure was built in the 1950s to 1970s for a different climate regime and we are trying to manage 21st century climate issues without considering what could happen in the future. One infrastructure failure can cause cascading impacts, but each individual infrastructure is owned or operated by a different entity, and there is not a lot of coordination between them to figure out what problem points are.
Ronald Eguchi, CEO and co-founder of Long Beach, California-based risk management company ImageCat, emphasized the importance of functional recovery—the ability of a building or lifeline infrastructure system to maintain or quickly restore essential functions after a shock. He believes that this concept is crucial for both buildings and lifelines and can help institutionalize resilience.
To address these challenges, the NIBS’ Lifeline Infrastructure Hub fosters partnerships among federal, state, and local governments, nonprofits, and industry groups to better manage extreme weather impacts and help communities bounce back after disasters. Launched last year, it aims to identify critical infrastructure gaps and cost-effective ways to mend them.
Rebuilding infrastructure networks to meet modern needs is costly but badly needed, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act helped counteract the impact of inflation, but the country’s lifeline systems are still “woefully underfunded” amid declining gas tax revenue. North Carolina has turned to public-private partnerships to help fill that funding gap.
New Orleans is drawing lessons from past disasters and near-disasters to guide its infrastructure upgrades. Steven Nelson, general superintendent of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, believes that there is a major need for targeted investment. He also highlighted how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help jurisdictions and utilities understand how to direct their limited resources for maximal impact
