How do we prepare now for a future of unprecedented resource scarcity and environmental change?  Unless we take radical steps to increase the resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructure, access to vital systems and services is at risk. VEIL's third paper on distributed systems highlights the forces increasing the vulnerability of current infrastructure and services and presents the case for distributed systems as an alternative design model.

Authors: Che Biggs, Chris Ryan, John Wiseman
Participating Institutions: Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab and The McCaughey Centre, University of Melbourne

We suggest the distributed systems model exists in the natural environment and in production and consumption systems that have already begun adapting to conditions of increased uncertainty, resource scarcity and a ‘low-carbon’ future. A distributed approach to system design offers many benefits over traditional infrastructure models.

Research and case studies strongly suggest such an approach can:
1. Increase the physical resilience of infrastructure
2. Foster social and institutional flexibility and innovation
3. Reduce the environmental footprint of production and consumption

A strong and renewed interest in distributed systems is being fuelled by access to sophisticated technologies – particularly information and communications technology.
This is allowing people to invent and adopt new ways to produce, interact and consume, that are increasingly localised and networked. This change in system design
is developing rapidly in multiple sectors.

Over the next few decades the way people obtain their food, water and energy will undergo a major (r)evolution. One pathway sees people no longer relying on industrial
production units hundreds or thousands of kilometres, or even continents, away. Instead they will source a greater proportion of essential resources, goods and services
from within their ‘neighbourhood’. Energy (principally electricity) is already showing signs of this transformation in most developed economies, with innovative
arrangements of gas, solar, wind and biomass generators positioned throughout every region, backed up by new storage systems and some remaining large-scale centralised
power stations. Developments in the water and food sectors seem to be following the same path.

This evolution sees a significant switch in people’s role within the economy and in their identity as citizens; moving from one of passive consumption to a more active
engagement in production and exchange of economic and social capital. In this future, people will no longer depend on contractual arrangements between corporatised
utilities and government to ensure quality and security of services. Everyone will identify in one way or another as a ‘prosumer’ – being involved (either individually or through
community arrangements) in the production as well as the consumption of part of the resources, goods and services on which they depend.