"Resilience will mean different things for individuals and communities around the country.
They will be exposed to different effects and risks and there will be different conversations in each of those communities about the level of risk they are willing to live with."
An example of what is already happening is the frequency of flooding and the severity of rainfall events on the West Coast. He says climate change events like these happening already continue to magnify the challenge ahead.
"It becomes very costly to engineer infrastructure to cope with what will become the new once-in-a-hundred year's event. The conversations taking place in communities need to understand what level of risk and what level of cost is going to be palatable for them and then land on a solution", he says.
Every community around the country will need to have their own conversations. It doesn't help that the conditions are changing all the time.
On top of this Douglass says there are challenges as our cities become more popular.
This leads to an increase in density and the need to get more people away from cars and onto public transport or different modes of transport such as walking and cycling.
He says: "To make the increase in density more efficient you need to develop hubs and encourage communities to become more centred around these hubs.
"Then there is the aging existing infrastructure under the ground dealing with wastewater and stormwater run-off. As the density changes some of these systems will be overloaded and dealing with the aging element is another cost communities need to be aware of and plan for."
Discussions have already started about water reform; the government's proposed changes are already controversial. Douglass says that's before you factor issues like climate risk into the conversation.
"The cost of making water resilient into the future is unknown. We're seeing really big discussions trickling down to the individual level, to the people who use and rely on the assets. This could be part of the conversation around sustainability, resilience and decarbonisation.
"For us to build more resilience, society needs to change its behaviours around a whole range of things."
For Douglass, any reform is most likely to run into opposition when people feel their views are not being listened to.
He says: "We know the cost of living is rising. There are other pressures on people and communities and that makes it tough.
"You can have a discussion which starts along the lines of 'this area where you live could soon be flooded every other year because the necessary assets are not available or they are not designed to deal with the new storm events that climate change will bring and that's going to mean an increase on your rates'.
"Having these conversations is a massive challenge for our government or a local government."
We know people are naturally resistant to change.
Douglass is optimistic about this in the longer term. He says providing the information is the best way to get people to accept change.
"You need to let people digest the information and come up with, hopefully, a pragmatic decision on the best way forward. That requires time."
Yet with climate change, there's an element of urgency. We might not have enough time.
He says the key is to get communities engaged with the process and to provide the best scientific and engineering advice to clients, in this case, central or local government.
His job and the job of the infrastructure sector is to stay focused on the bigger picture and pathways to get where we need to be.
A more immediate challenge is the Carbon Neutral Government Programme established in 2020.
This requires public sector agencies to measure and publicly report on their emissions and to offset any they can't cut by 2025.
Douglass works with government agencies grappling with the challenges of meeting these targets, something he says has been made harder by the Covid pandemic.
He says: "The challenge around getting to carbon neutral by 2025 for the agencies that are part of that programme is a massive undertaking. It means moving fast and on a large scale. The first step in that lies in understanding that cutting carbon is about more than an agency's direct emissions. Getting a handle on indirect emissions is not an easy task because agencies require their suppliers to feed that information back to them.
"It's not clear if the supply chain is geared up to supply that information back into the agency to let them fully understand their carbon footprint before they make decisions about how to decarbonise those parts of their operation.
"Government agencies will find it difficult to achieve that target by 2025. In my view, there will be a lot of focus on offsetting to achieve it."
For now, that means planting trees. Douglass says the technology around carbon sequestration is still in its infancy and not viable, but it is gaining traction internationally as an area for investment. It sounds hard, but Douglass says moving to carbon neutral is the easier challenge facing government agencies because you can put tangible targets in place and work towards them. Dealing with resiliency is harder.
• GHD is an advertising sponsor of the Herald's Sustainable Business & Finance report.
