Dr Juliet Mian was a speaker and panellist at this this year’s Asia-Pacific Transport Forum, taking place as a Virtual Meeting from 24-28 August 2020. Organised by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Forum brings together representatives from ADB’s Developing Member Countries, industry practitioners and the ADB community to exchange knowledge and ideas on key transport issues, particularly in these times of unprecedented challenges to transport and human mobility imposed by the ongoing pandemic.
In her capacity as Deputy Executive Director of The Resilience Shift, Juliet participated in the session: Emerging Stronger: Upstream Actions for Environmental, Climate Change and Disaster Resilience in Transport Infrastructure.
She highlighted work from our programme of activities that demonstrates the importance of upstream actions for resilience, in particular our policy work and recent round table with national infrastructure commissions and bodies. She also talked about transferring knowledge between sectors, in particular the learning from our work in the water sector, supporting the City Water Resilience Approach with its end to end multi-stakeholder collaboration to build urban water resilience across a catchment. This is inspiring how we are approaching work in the transport sector including our major new project on resilience for ports. Finally she highlighted the role of resilient leadership and how leaders must build in resilience upstream to create transformative change.
The session focused on how severe damage and disruption to transport networks in recent decades has highlighted the importance of ensuring systems are environmentally sound, and resilient to the impacts of disasters and climate change.
Beyond tackling these challenges at a project level, there is growing global recognition that more transformative changes can be brought about through upstream actions to build transport system resilience such as strategic planning, risk and resilience assessment, and capacity development.
This session shared international and regional examples and good practice perspectives on upstream actions to enhance environmental, climate change and disaster resilience of transport infrastructure to geophysical hazards and extreme weather events.
It was also an opportunity to stimulate discussion on how to create an enabling environment for longer term sustainability and resilience of transport services.
This session took place on Wednesday 26 August from 10.00-11.30H (GMT+8) on Zoom. To register for the Forum please go to their website at https://adb.eventsair.com/virtual-asian-transport-forum-2020/
