Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience

Building the resilience of Australia's critical infrastructure

Supported by next generation science and technology, the Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience (CIPR) initiative is creating enhanced national capability to overcome the current fragmented response to Australia’s essential services ‘centre of vulnerability’. This is when our increasingly interdependent critical infrastructure sectors and systems converge with increasingly interconnected natural and human-induced hazards.

The challenge

We find that increasingly, multiple hazards (including both natural and human-induced hazards) are happening at the same time, and causing problems in multiple sectors, due to a rise in interdependency between the sectors.

The composition of this vulnerability is complex and evolving; however, the cause is identified by specific and dominant simultaneous occurrences increasingly at play in our world:

1. Global climate change,
2. Rapid escalation of cyberattacks,
3. Rise in geopolitical tensions, and
4. Increasing digitisation within the construction and operation of critical infrastructure assets.

Hazard events threatening critical infrastructure are increasingly interconnected, leading to a compounding effect where one hazard triggers or occurs with another that creates a cascading impact across regions. A fire or flood in one region can cause a road closure that creates supply chain disruptions. Examples include Cyclone Jasper that hit North Queensland in 2023 generating an incredible amount of rain and causing an estimated $1 billion in damages and an estimated $60 million hit to the tourism sector.   A second and simultaneous challenge is the increasing interdependence of one critical infrastructure sector on others. For example, the Optus outage in November 2023 affecting 10 million mobile phone and internet customers. This event also impacted 400,000 businesses; government departments; health and transport systems in Melbourne; and health and water services in South Australia. It is estimated to have cost the Australian economy $1 billion.

The opportunity

We are working on two core national needs:

1. Critical Infrastructure Protection: lifting protection of critical infrastructure sectors and the communities they service, from the direct and flow-on impacts of multi-hazard events; and
2. Critical Infrastructure Resilience: enhancing resiliency of critical infrastructure assets, systems, networks, supply chains and the community from changing threats.

We are coordinating national efforts and collaborating with government, industry and research partners to enhance Australia’s capability through understanding risks and vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure, modelling impacts and identifying effective mitigation and resiliency.

Importantly, these challenges are not unique to Australia. Solutions to these challenges also represent new market opportunities for Australian businesses and new local jobs for Australia.

CIPR aims to bring together a broad coalition of government and private sector stakeholders to develop solutions, leveraging leading-edge science and technology and global expertise, to ensure the ongoing resilience of our critical infrastructure.