WEBINAR: Climate-Resilient Infrastructure -- 28 April 2016

Greetings!

I've been rather swamped with a major project for the past few months so my Blog has been pretty quiet.  Anyway, I want to pass along this one Webinar my fellow infrastructure colleagues may be interested.

WEBINAR:  NEW APPROACHES TO CLIMATE-RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

LINK:  http://uweoconnect.extn.washington.edu/public_mipm/ 

WHEN:  THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2016, 11:00 AM TO NOON PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME (GMT-7)

This FREE webinar will feature a panel of experts on infrastructure planning and climate change discussing new approaches to planning climate-resilient infrastructure.  The topics to be covered include:

• How climate change affects infrastructure
  
• How planners can respond to climate change by planning integrated and resilient infrastructure
  
• Principles for re-thinking how we invest in infrastructure
  
• How US Federal Agencies are adapting this approach to their grants and disaster relief programs, including information on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Resilience Challenge and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Disaster Resilience Competition

Hosts:

Ms. Jill Sterrett, FAICP, Affiliate Instructor,  Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA  USA

Mr. Rhys Roth, Faculty and Director of the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA USA

Mr. Steve Moddemeyer, Principal, CollinsWoerman Architects, Seattle, WA USA

Taking Infrastructure Seriously

Remember the 2013 infrastructure grade report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)?  A snapshot of the 2013 grades for the US were quite damning and are posted in the picture below:

My immediate response is WOW followed by an emoticon of sadness :-(

These grades are two years old and I suspect they have not improved and perhaps have gotten even worse.

Maybe with a new Speaker of the House perhaps some new attention on this national crisis will happen (?) -- I certainly hope so.

In the World Economic Forum AGENDA, there is an article by the Honorable Gordon Brown (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) with the headline GORDON BROWN:  IT'S TIME TO TAKE INFRASTRUCTURE SERIOUSLY.

Mr. Brown's article offers a very critical and less than optimistic view of the world's current infrastructure crisis that prompted me to write this blog.  He offers some of the following facts:

• There is a $20 Trillion backlog in infrastructure maintenance/upgrade requirements running to 2030
• 18% of the world's citizens are left without electricity
• 11% of the world's citizens are left without clean water
• 20% are deprived of basic healthcare
• 58M children denied primary schooling

Gordon continues to observe that without action on improving this blight in infrastructure eradicating extreme poverty cannot not be achieved.

Ideas Needed

Yes, infrastructure capital projects -- new and upgrades -- are expensive and may be risky; however, interest rates are low and there is new emphasis on public-private partnerships to take necessary actions to at least improve the current situation.  Unfortunately, we are so far behind in the US let alone the other parts of the economically advanced nations that paying attention to the less developed countries may be obscured by the problems we face.

Leadership is needed tackle this issue in conjunction with climate change....they are both intertwined and I'd like to commend Mr. Brown and the World Economic Forum for raising awareness on this daunting issue.

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