SYNOPSIS

Flood Resilient Cities

Global cities face unprecedented pressures from population growth and climate change. A study of possible future scenarios shows that their vulnerability to flooding is likely to increase very significantly and that traditional approaches to defending communities from flooding are likely to become unaffordable. A paradigm shift is needed, to answer the question “how do we make our cities more resilient to flooding in the future?” Already there are good examples around the world of the sort of measures that might be employed to successfully tackle the issue of flood resilience. The workshop will explore how these might be brought together in a structured way to deliver a range of measures that tackle flooding at source, along pathways and at receptors. They will include structural measures that involve changing the fabric of urban communities, and non-structural measures that address flood warnings and how communities can respond. The workshop will build on examples from around the world and will help delegates to understand what such measures might look like in the future and to discuss how the new paradigm might best be achieved in particular circumstances.


SPEAKER’S BIODATA

David Balmforth is the current outgoing president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) UK. David is also an Executive Technical Director with the international engineering company MWH, which he joined in 1999. He is an accomplished civil engineer  pecializing in flood risk management and urban pollution control. Formally an academic, his recent work ranges from the delivery of multi-million engineering programmes, to flood advisory work for municipalities in the UK and overseas. He has acted as an advisor to governments on infrastructure development, and has recently worked to alleviate flooding in London, Glasgow and Singapore. His novel approaches to managing urban river pollution have been widely adopted and he has exhibited at the Design Centre in London. Formally a non –executive director of the Construction Industry Research and Information Association and Editor of the Journal of Flood Risk Management, David is a visiting professor at Imperial College.