Rebuilding for resilience — lessons from Puerto Rico and beyond
Over the course of just a few hours, Hurricane Maria exposed how fragile Puerto Rico is. Years of underinvestment in infrastructure and the recent financial crisis let the island languish, making the devastation far worse than it would have been otherwise. The storm caused the island’s entire electric grid to fail, its network of roads and highways to be disrupted, and access to clean drinking water lost. With no shortage of ideas on how to rebuild using better, stronger and cleaner technologies, who decides what gets built? How will it all be financed?