Government bodies, utilities, practitioners, and researchers have growing interest in the incorporation of resilience into wastewater management. Since resilience is a multidisciplinary term, it is important to review what has been achieved in the wastewater sector, and describe the future research directions for the forthcoming years. This work presents a critical review of studies that deal with resilience in the wastewater treatment sector, with a special focus on understanding how they addressed the key elements for assessing resilience, such as stressors, system properties, metrics and interventions to increase resilience. The results showed that only 17 peer-reviewed papers and 6 relevant reports, a small subset of the work in wastewater research, directly addressed resilience. The lack of consensus in the definition of resilience, and the elements of a resilience assessment, is hindering the implementation of resilience in wastewater management. To date, no framework for resilience assessment is complete, comprehensive or directly applicable to practitioners; current examples are lacking key elements (e.g. a comprehensive study of stressors, properties and metrics, examples of cases study, ability to benchmark interventions or connectivity with broader frameworks). Furthermore, resilience is seen as an additional cost or extra effort, instead of a means to overcome project uncertainty that could unlock new opportunities for investment.

Extreme weather causes substantial adverse socio-economic impacts by damaging and disrupting the infrastructure services that underpin modern society. Globally, $2.5tn a year is spent on infrastructure which is typically designed to last decades, over which period projected changes in the climate will modify infrastructure performance. A systems approach has been developed to assess risks across all infrastructure sectors to guide national policy making and adaptation investment. The method analyses diverse evidence of climate risks and adaptation actions, to assess the urgency and extent of adaptation required. Application to the UK shows that despite recent adaptation efforts, risks to infrastructure outweigh opportunities. Flooding is the greatest risk to all infrastructure sectors: even if the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2°C is achieved, the number of users reliant on electricity infrastructure at risk of flooding would double, while a 4°C rise could triple UK flood damage. Other risks are significant, for example 5% and 20% of river catchments would be unable to meet water demand with 2°C and 4°C global warming respectively. Increased interdependence between infrastructure systems, especially from energy and information and communication technology (ICT), are amplifying risks, but adaptation action is limited by lack of clear responsibilities. A programme to build national capability is urgently required to improve infrastructure risk assessment.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy’.

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Abstract. Spatially extensive multi-year hydrological droughts cause significant environmental stress. The UK is expected to remain vulnerable to future multi-year droughts under climate change. Existing approaches to quantify hydrological impacts of climate change often rely solely on global climate model (GCM) projections following different emission scenarios. This may miss out low-probability events with significant impacts. As a means of exploring such events, physical climate storyline approaches aim to quantify physically coherent articulations of how observed events could hypothetically have unfolded in alternative ways. This study uses the 2010–2012 drought, the most recent period of severe hydrological drought in the UK, as a basis and analyses storylines based on changes to (1) precondition severity, (2) temporal drought sequence, and (3) climate change. Evidence from multiple storylines shows that the maximum intensity, mean deficit, and duration of the 2010–2012 drought were highly influenced by its meteorological preconditions prior to drought inception, particularly for northern catchments at shorter timescales. The influence of progressively drier preconditions reflects both the spatial variation in drought preconditions and the role of physical catchment characteristics, particularly hydrogeology in the propagation of multi-year droughts. There are two plausible storylines of an additional dry year with dry winter conditions repeated either before the observed drought or replacing the observed dramatic drought termination confirm the vulnerability of UK catchments to a “third dry winter” storyline. Applying the UKCP18 climate projections, we find that drought conditions worsen with global warming with a mitigation of drought conditions by wetter winters in northern catchments at high warming levels. Comparison of the storylines with a benchmark drought (1975–1976) and a protracted multi-year drought (1989–1993) shows that, for each storyline (including the climate change storylines), drought conditions could have matched and exceeded those experienced during the past droughts at catchments across the UK, particularly for southern catchments. The construction of storylines based on observed events can complement existing methods to stress test UK catchments against plausible unrealised droughts.