This content was originally published on The Resilience Shift website. The Resilience Shift, a 5-year programme supported by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and hosted by Arup, transitioned at the end of 2021 to become Resilience Rising. You can read more about The Resilience Shift’s journey and the transition to Resilience Rising here.
Today we celebrate our participation in this year’s SIWI World Water Week that takes place 23-27 August 2021. This annual influential gathering focused on global water challenges has been organised for 30 years by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).
Resilient water systems are critical to humanity’s ability to survive and thrive and are interconnected and interdependent with other critical infrastructure systems. Look out for our sessions steered by Louise Ellis, who leads our The Resilience Shift work on water resilience and is an award-winning engineer at our host firm, Arup. In the sessions, we take the opportunity, in collaboration with our many partners to advance knowledge, foster new thinking and develop solutions to the most pressing water-related challenges of today.
Utilities of the Future (Monday 23 August 20.00-21.00 BST) – this session on explores how water utilities around the world can tackle future uncertainties. With Arup’s Mark Fletcher and Janine Witko, DC Water’s David Gadis, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s Debra Shore, Northumbrian Water’s Ian Gray, and hosted by Louise Ellis of The Resilience Shift.
SIWI Seminar: Urban water resilience, from utopia to reality (Tuesday 14.00-15.00 BST) – this session will showcase how individual cities in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin and North America have built resilience to future shocks and stresses and increased uncertainty, and the role of stakeholders at different levels in the process. With Louise Ellis hosting a keynote on behalf of Arup and The Resilience Shift, in partnership with Tony Wong, Water Sensitive Cities. This session also includes Joep Verhagen, Fernando Armendaris, and panellists José Araujo, Shreya Nath, Kerrie Burge, Pendo Hyera, Adrian Healy, Yasmina El Amine, Mike Webster, and Natalia Reyes Tejada (representing ENDA tiers-monde, UNESCO Megacities Alliance for Water and Climate, Global Center on Adaptation, SIWI, and World Bank Group).
Pathways to resilient, blue-green growth for cities Wednesday 06.00-07.00 BST) – in this session, we explore three city case studies using governance, spatial analysis and machine learning approaches to deliver resilient, blue-green growth in Addis Ababa, Hull and Shanghai. With Louise Ellis, The Resilience Shift and Arup, Living with Water Partnership/Hull & East Riding’s Lee Pitcher, Resilient Cities Network’s Katrin Bruebach (moderating), the Shanghai Urban Construction Design and Research Institute’s Xiaoxuan Ma, and the World Resources Institute’s Rogier van den Berg.
Registration is free for a basic attendance pass, which you can get on the World Water Week website. Can’t make it? Not to worry, recordings of all sessions are due to be published on YouTube after the conference.
These sessions make reference to our previous work in the area of urban water resilience, in collaboration with a wide range of partners, including the City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA), and the eight cities where it has been developed, and particularly those where it has been implemented such as Greater Miami, Cape Town and Hull; the CWRA’s current application in Africa City Regions, and noting also our resilience success story case study on Washington DC Water’s green infrastructure solution to stormwater management.
