BUILDING RESILIENCE
IMPLEMENTING INNOVATIVE, SUSTAINABLE FLOOD
MITIGATION SOLUTIONS
FOR THE GULF COAST
Please join us at the Building Resilience Workshop on February 25-27, 2010, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to explore innovative, sustainable ways of increasing community resilience in the face of global climate change.
Workshop speakers and participants will address such questions as:
- How have international communities, faced with repeated, catastrophic storm and flood events, maintained physical and social infrastructures?
- What innovations have occurred in response to catastrophic events?
- How can mitigation strategies that diffuse risk, as opposed to concentrating risk, reduce a community's overall vulnerability and increase its resilience?
- How might cultures share “best practices” and incorporate innovative, sustainable technologies more quickly?
- What are the successful approaches that have been used elsewhere to overcome institutional resistance to change that inhibits the implementation of new strategies?
- How can technical solutions be more responsive to social and cultural needs and traditional ways of life?
- What are both the physical and cultural implications of redesigning cities for increased resilience?
- What planning decisions can we make now that will help us build resilience and adaptability into our cities for the future?
Speakers from Germany, the Netherlands and across North America will come together with local leaders to discuss how flood mitigation strategies such as wetlands restoration, cascading levee systems, compartmentalization, temporary floodwalls, amphibious housing, wet-proofing and dry-proofing, elevating, berming, regenerative landscaping, ground surface treatments and other non-structural approaches can be implemented in the Gulf Coast region in general and in New Orleans in particular. It is a goal of this workshop to create greater awareness in the Gulf Coast region of approaches that are being implemented successfully in other parts of the world but may not yet be embraced in the United States. The workshop will encourage an attitude of accommodating, rather than fighting, water. We must learn to live, in safety, WITH water.
The workshop is organized as follows:
We will have four Plenary speakers, plus Gen. Russel Honore’ as the Keynote speaker. The rest of the program will be panel discussions, where 6-8 panelists give brief, 5-6 minute presentations, and then there is discussion first among the panel members and then with the audience. We will start with issues at the global scale, then regional and urban scale, then building scale, then community participation and policy implementation issues. Larry Buss, retired from the USACE and longtime chair of the National Non-Structural Floodproofing Committee, will be the initial Plenary speaker, starting us off on Friday morning, prior to the panel on climate and global-scale issues. Erik Pasche’s presentation on cascading levees, compartmentalization and temporary floodwall systems will preceed the panels on regional and urban scale issues on Friday afternoon, and Chris Zevenbergen’s presentation on amphibious housing in the Netherlands will introduce the building scale issues on Saturday morning. Jack Martin will be the plenary speaker at lunch on Saturday, addressing how to achieve community participation and institutional support for implementing new policies.
In the short term, the workshop will bring together engineers, architects, planners and academic researchers specializing in sustainable flood protection practices with policy makers, community organizers and public officials, helping to expand the knowledge base, build exchange networks among participants, and develop solutions. In the long term, the workshop will provide a springboard for the sharing of sustainable, low-impact technologies that save lives and make vulnerable communities, in North America and elsewhere, more resilient to climate change.
