Infrastructure resilience defines the very trajectory of our collective future. Yet, as disaster and climate risks continue to intensify, as seen in 2025 through Cyclone Remal in South Asia, floods in Bolivia, the earthquake in Myanmar and Cyclone Melissa in the Caribbean, this future is becoming increasingly vulnerable to escalating risks. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), in its Global Assessment Report 2025, estimates that global disaster costs now exceed $2.3 trillion, underscoring the scale and urgency of the risk landscape. Moreover, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI)’s own analytics estimate the annual damage to global infrastructure from geological and climate-related disasters to lie between $732 and 845 billion.

In response to this, CDRI, through its landmark Global Infrastructure Resilience Report (GIR 2023), examined the global landscape of infrastructure risk and resilience to identify pathways for upscaling resilience through evidence rather than rhetoric. At its core lies the first fully probabilistic and publicly available risk assessment tool of its kind, the Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI). For critical infrastructure sectors and across major geological and climate-related hazards, GIRI plays a pivotal role in identifying the contingent liabilities that governments face, thereby enabling informed decision-making and strengthening the development of reliable and robust resilience strategies and policies.

Through its two editions, the Global Infrastructure Resilience Report has sought to move from building a normative understanding of risk and resilience to offering practical pathways for capturing the “resilience dividend”.  To translate this understanding into practice, the Second Global Infrastructure Resilience Report (GIR 2025) contains the revamped “GIRI 2.0” version, that has been expanded to include additional hazards and sectors, while also assessing the additional risk that may accumulate if countries continue developing infrastructure with existing resilience gaps and evaluating the broader economy-wide implications of infrastructure failures. Further, GIRI 2.0 also presents disaggregated analysis for over seven countries, marking a significant advancement in the depth, granularity and practical relevance of its outputs.

Against this backdrop, this 90-minute online Masterclass, the first in a two-part series, will explore the following aspects:

• Understanding the foundations of GIRI: its methodology, modelling approach and analytical framework.
• A demonstration of the GIRI Data Platform: its features, navigation tools and detailed reports to support a nuanced understanding of the tool.
• Tracing the evolution from GIRI 1.0 to GIRI 2.0: demonstrating how earlier data informed regional analyses in Africa and Small Island Developing States, and how the 2025 edition advances these insights for practical application.

Designed for infrastructure agencies, regulators, ministries of planning and finance, asset owners, development partners, financial institutions, researchers and resilience practitioners, this  offers a structured deep dive into GIRI’s development, functionality and applications. It seeks to equip stakeholders with the knowledge and confidence to mainstream risk assessment into infrastructure planning and investment processes through a strong and credible evidence base.