Job Description

Request for Proposal 

Date: 23 January 2025

Hiring an Organization for the Development of the Second Iteration of the Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI)

1. Background

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is a multi-stakeholder global partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and academic and knowledge institutions.

It aims to address the challenges of building resilience into infrastructure systems and the development associated with it. The vision, mission, goal, and objectives of CDRI are explicitly linked to the post-2015 development agendas.

CDRI launched its inaugural Biennial Report on Global Infrastructure Resilience: Capturing the Resilience Dividend in October 2023. The Biennial Report is CDRI’s principal vehicle for engaging and focusing the attention of a global audience of political leaders, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers on the critical and multifaceted challenges posed by disasters and climate change on infrastructure assets, systems, and services.

The Report builds the evidence for prioritizing investments to bolster infrastructure resilience globally, particularly by aiding Coalition members through knowledge sharing, capacity building, and exchange of best practices. Moving forward, CDRI aims to publish the Second Biennial Report by 2025.

The Second Biennial Report will leverage the key findings and lessons from the inaugural edition to strengthen the analysis further and address some of the questions posed by the Report towards capturing the resilience dividend.

2. The First CDRI Biennial Report

The first edition of the Biennial Report is a significant milestone in CDRI’s ongoing effort to advance disaster and climate-resilient infrastructure globally. The report addresses the unique challenges Low-and-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) face.

It outlines pathways for global resilience improvement, leveraging data from the first-ever fully probabilistic global risk assessment of infrastructure assets, known as the Global Infrastructure Risk Model & Resilience Index (GIRI).

GIRI assesses the risk and resilience across nine major critical infrastructure assets covering seven hazards at a global level to arrive at financial metrics that instigate countries to formulate policies, plans, and strategies that incorporate resilience.

Further, through rigorous data, evidence, and outputs, the report underscores the idea of the “resilience dividend” that can support countries in transforming the perception of resilience from a cost to an opportunity, fostering financial incentives for resilience investments that benefit governments, investors, and communities alike.

Apart from GIRI, the first Report also outlines four critical dimensions for enhancing infrastructure resilience and capturing the resilience dividend, starting with improving infrastructure governance that involves enhanced planning, design standards, codes, regulations, compliance with Operations and Maintenance, and best practices exchange to ensure the reliability and quality of infrastructure.

The third dimension is investing in resilience through attracting untapped private institutional capital (US$ 106 trillion worldwide) and innovative financial mechanisms. The report also highlights the need for knowledge sharing and capacity building on infrastructure resilience.

Lastly, it explores the innovative use of nature-based infrastructure solutions to integrate natural systems in infrastructure design and operation strategies.

The report along with its executive summary is available for download at: cdri.world/gir. The GIRI data platform is also an integral part of the Biennial Report and makes available the data from the GIRI model for visualization, interpretation, and analysis. It can be accessed at: cdri.world/giri.

3. The Second CDRI Biennial Report

The Second CDRI Biennial Report builds on the comprehensive risk assessment methodology with global applicability developed for the first report. The Second Report aims to answer some of the questions raised during the preparation and dissemination of the first Report, expanding its remit and strengthening the connections between the risk analysis and the financial, institutional, and technological dimensions of resilient infrastructure.

CDRI intends to have strong linkages between the various lines of work of the Second Report and the rest of the organization to ensure that the latest practical results and field experiences of CDRI teams are reflected in the Biennial Report and, vice versa, the methodologies and frontier thinking of the Report is incorporated in the work program of the Coalition.

The Second CDRI Biennial Report is organized along two main pillars. The first pillar is based on a series of modelling and analytical pieces that deepen, downscale, and project the results of the first Biennial Report into the future. The second pillar advances the work of the first Biennial Report from the “what” to the “how.”

Pillar 1: Deepening, Downscaling, Projecting

The Second CDRI Biennial Report expands the work of the first report along three lines of work:

Deepening the understanding of resilient infrastructure by (i) incorporating additional risks and updating the model with new databases[1]; (ii) undertaking specific assessments of economic and poverty impacts due to infrastructure services failures caused by disasters,

including a perspective on small and community infrastructure; and (iii) completing global surveys to understand better the underlying factors of insufficient resilience and the impacts on businesses and the economy.

Downscaling the global analysis undertaken for the first Biennial Report to the country and sub-national level to provide higher-quality risk assessments using better data and understanding of local conditions through national partners.

At the same time, these analyses will review options, costs, and benefits of resilience and adaptation measures to reduce the impacts of disasters on infrastructure assets, systems, and services.

Projecting the modelling exercise to incorporate future expected trends, including investment trajectories to achieve the infrastructure-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets (with special attention to the vulnerabilities of last mile infrastructure services), the projected growth of urban centres, and related areas of analysis.

The following sections describe the specific research and analysis questions that will be explored in the second Biennial Report. The questions that can be answered with existing data and reasonable levels of accuracy will be included in the second Biennial Report.

Pillar 2: How to Capture the Resilience Dividend

The first Biennial Report provided a robust analysis of the magnitude of the “resilience dividend” at the global and national levels. It also took the first steps in analysing ways to build and maintain more resilient and climate-adapted infrastructure, including nature-based solutions and financial mechanisms. The Second Biennial Report will build on the foundation of the first report.

It intends to move from the question of “What is the magnitude of the potential resilience dividend?” to “How can this resilience dividend be captured?”

Under this Pillar, the Second Biennial Report will review (i) financial instruments for resilience and adaptation, (ii) institutional, governance, and capacity frameworks, and (iii) frontier tools, including disruptive technologies and nature-based solutions, among others.

The report will present frameworks for each work area, building on the best approaches developed by other organizations, documenting good practices, and creating roadmaps for action.

The “how to” discussions in Pillar 2 will be structured around and closely linked to the framework used in the first Biennial Report, which is based on countries' capacities to absorb a disturbance to the infrastructure asset caused by a disaster, respond to the disaster, and recover to the original performance (or even to build back better).

Proposal Submission

Please share proposals in two separate PDF files:  

Technical Proposal (Open PDF file) 

Financial Proposal (Password-Protected PDF File)  

Note: The Financial Proposal PDF must be password-protected. The password for FINANCIAL PROPOSAL MUST NOT BE SHARED ALONG WITH THE PROPOSAL. The password for the financial proposal will be requested separately. 

The proposal must be sent to the email address tender.projects@cdri.world with the subject line: "Development of the Second Iteration of the Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index (GIRI).”

Interested bidders are requested to submit their proposal by 23:59 hrs (IST) on 28 February 2025. Responses received after the stipulated time or not in accordance will be summarily rejected. 

Please ensure that your proposal is sent ONLY to ABOVE MENTIONED email ID before the closing date & time. Proposals sent/copied to any other email ID (other than above) OR received after the bid closing date & time (mentioned above) will not be entertained. 

For detailed information, please check the complete version of the RFP attached below.

About Company

CDRI promotes rapid development of resilient infrastructure to respond to the Sustainable Development Goals’ imperatives of expanding universal access to basic services, enabling prosperity and decent work.

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