Hanbury and Virginia Tech to Present on Resilient Campus at International Conference
Last year was certainly a wake up call for the need for resilience planning in higher education—and beyond. Insurers are set to pay out a record $135 billion to cover losses from natural disasters in 2017, stemming from the costliest hurricane season ever in the United States and widespread flooding in South Asia.
But resiliency isn’t only about responding to natural disasters. Its about building resiliency into systems, cities, buildings, campuses, communities and mindsets.
Hanbury will join global experts next week at the international conference, “Infrastructure Resilience, Enabling Systems to Bounce Forward,” in Zurich, Switzerland, on the campus of ETH Zurich, a science, technology, engineering and mathematics university.
Hanbury will present on “The Resilient Campus, Measuring Resilience of Universities and their Communities.” D. Keith Storms, Hanbury vice president and principal planner, will present with Dan Simundza, research scientist at the Global Forum on Urban and Regional Resilience at Virginia Tech.
The Hanbury-Virginia Tech session, at 4 p.m. Feb. 14, will be just one of dozens to dig deeper into differing slices of resiliency. Conference participants will present on and explore topics such as social ecological resilience, urban resilience, cybersecurity resilience, climate change and resilient based design of critical facilities. It is drawing experts from universities, including Johns Hopkins, Australia National University, and ETH Zurich, as well as thought leaders from entities such as the DOD, the Urban Development Authority, Singapore and the Federal Office for Civil Protect, Switzerland.
The need for resilience for higher education is especially acute, given the myriad of risks stemming from climate change, rising sea levels, financial challenges and the need to repair, renovate or replace aging infrastructures while working with local communities.
The conference is being organized by Future Resilient Systems (FRS) and the ETH Risk Center. FRS is the second program of the Singapore-ETH Centre, established by ETH Zurich and the National Research Foundation, under its CREATE program. The program seeks to develop a framework, concepts, and tools to make interconnected critical infrastructure systems more robust and resilient.
The interdisciplinary ETH Risk Center was established by ETH Zurich in mid 2011. The founding of the centre placed ETH Zurich among the leading proponents of understanding the growing complexity and interdependence of our social and engineered systems, and discovering and modeling related behavioral phenomena.
The conference runs Feb. 14-16. The conference agenda is here.
