Critical Asset Management (CAM) tool for infrastructure

The Critical Asset Management System (CAMS) is a collaborative, open-source, and data-centric tool that helps cities to identify their critical assets and the cascading failure chains should one of them fail.

Climate change is increasing the risk of extreme weather events all over the world. Often it is not those responsible for greenhouse emissions who suffer the worst consequences. Island nations, cities, and communities run the risk of devastation from natural hazards, stresses, and shocks. Governing bodies need to be resilient to these hazards to reduce their impacts, rebuild better and efficiently and save lives.  

Protecting critical assets is essential to ensure city’s resilience. While a city may be able to identify many of its critical assets, there are still several major gaps to be addressed. For example:

• Do you know which critical assets could affect the city’s disaster and climate resilience?
• Do you understand the risk that each asset faces and how well placed it is to deal with that risk?
• Do you understand how assets are interconnected and the chained consequences that may result?

Without understanding, these gaps, shocks and stresses can lead to failure chains which can significantly weaken resilience. The goal of CAMS is to help cities plan, protect critical assets, and respond to inevitable disasters to save lives and rebuild faster.

Goal: Strengthening the capacities in cities of small countries to assess the exposure of critical infrastructure and to make risk-informed investments on how to better protect critical assets.

Expected results: Development of a tool that enables assessing potential system failures and enhances users' knowledge and capacity to prevent systemic risks.

Other partners:

• Ministry of Planning, Dominica
• City Government of Oakland, Florida