Lebanon’s current crises: opportunities to "BUILD BACK BEtter" critical infrastructures and improve BeIRUT’s urban resilience – BUILDBACKBEIRUT

For several years multiple crises struck Lebanon successively often in a simultaneous manner. These marked a critical period in the country’s history and increased its fragility and precariousness. The capital Beirut was one of the most significantly affected areas especially after the “August 4th Beirut Port explosion”, one of the world's largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. The explosion surfaced the chronic challenges that face the critical infrastructure (CI) sector, namely the weakness of the urban service sector that is already burdened by the refugee, economic and political crises, and lately by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Lebanese CI system still bears the legacy of the 1975 civil war due to the lack of adequately planned post-war reconstruction phase. These factors underlie the main objective of the BUILDBACKBEIRUT project: planning the effective and sustainable recovery of Beirut’s CIs following the current crises. That way, the urban resilience of Lebanon’s capital will be promoted. For that purpose, CI are important elements for building the robustness and resilience of a city and are complementary to the other aspects linked to planning, sociology and the role of stakeholders (governance). By developing an operational approach, this project questions the modalities of post-disaster recovery of CIs in anticipation of future events. The expected results and implications of the project, are mainly centered on applied research and can be summarized as follows: 1) mapping the existing vulnerabilities and needs of CIs in Beirut (mainly technical and organizational), 2) modeling and mapping the multi-risk resilience of CIs in Beirut and 3) developing decision support methods/tools for a Build Back Better plan that improves Beirut's CI and urban resilience. The replication of the proposed methodologies could be done in the rest of the Lebanese territory and in various areas that are recovering (e.g. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc. or also in French overseas territories post-natural disaster).