The paper explores the challenges of creating objective metrics for the comparison of the resilience of both utilities with large numbers of assets or divisions within a single utility. The paper focuses on utility assets in the water sector using the AdaptWater analytic system. The AdaptWater system provides the ability to test and project risk cost per asset, but does not yet generate a high level metric that captures the resilience position in its entirety of an organisation or division.  This paper provides a summary of research to develop such a metric.

The paper investigates the use of a Resilience Index that compares the annual costs of risk and the total asset value, creating a financial and service failure index, broadly comparable with ‘availability’.

The paper provides the current and projected illustrative results of internal testing by Sydney Water across 6 core water and wastewater asset classes. The results show how such an index could be used to benchmark a portfolio and provide insights into the implications of hazards on asset failure and damage.

The paper proposes that a Resilience Index can be a useful way of illustrating the decay in resilience caused by climate change hazards and provide a useful benchmark to compare organisations within a sector and a metric to test the efficacy of adaptation plans.