Water resilience has been a key focus for us over August. We brought cities and stakeholders together at a three-day event – the Global Knowledge Exchange – hosted at Lloyd’s Register Foundation in London.
Water resilience is a connecting factor for cities as diverse as Miami, Mexico City, Amman, Hull and Cape Town. Following our fieldwork with them earlier this year, we heard from city representatives about the challenges they face. Together we continue to shape our resilient water governance work as well as our input to the Rockefeller Foundation-funded City Water Resilience Framework, co-hosts of the event.
At SIWI World Water Week, our events included a SIWI sofa panel discussing the Governance for Resilient Urban Water Systems project and the City Water Resilience Framework. A structured one-day programme of events supported a global focus on how to build a resilient future through water, with a number of high level dialogue sessions.
We also asked leading water resilience scientists and practitioners to present their current work in our showcase on water systems resilience design for urban systems, basins and transboundary water sources.
Water also became a personal issue for those in our team taking part in EarthEx. This online interactive exercise aimed to provide organisations and individuals with a forum to discuss, develop and test organisational plans to improve resilience to Black Sky Hazards. As an individual taking part in the exercise, the importance of water for our short- and long-term survival was brought home through your choices of priority items to keep your family safe during such an event.
We know that water is only one of the industry sectors we need to work with to achieve a shift towards resilience within and between critical infrastructure systems. The initial deadline closed for expressions of interest to develop industry-specific resilience primers. Thank you to all those who applied for this round.
Our work exploring the role that policy and regulation has to play is also moving forward, with plans in place to undertake several small scoping studies in this area, exploring recent developments in Australia as a starting point.
We discovered some more useful publications, including: ‘Resilience of Critical Infrastructures: Review and analysis of Current Approaches’ which considers the current issues surrounding the development of resilience metrics; ‘Safety and Reliability – Safe Societies in a changing world’ which represents the proceedings of the 2018 European Safety and Reliability Conference, and has a subsection around the topic of Resilience Engineering; ‘A value-based approach to infrastructure resilience’ that is a development from a paper previously submitted by two of our Grantees from MMI Engineering during the Resilience Shift’s first year, and who are currently working with us on our tools and approaches project.
This autumn, among other events, we’ll be at the 100 Resilient Cities CoLab Building a Water Resilient City in Cape Town, and at the World Bank Understanding Risk Balkans Conference in Belgrade, also the Institution of Civil Engineering (ICE)’s Global Engineering Congress in London. Get in touch if you’ll be attending.
You can continue to apply to us with specific expressions of interest and also submit your ideas generally. However there will be other specific calls throughout our programme. To avoid missing them, sign up to our blog round up to receive news of further opportunities for funding resilience projects.
