Join the Plymouth City Club for this lecture on flood resilience in cities and hear the perspective of the ICE President David Balmforth.
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. These need to 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 lecture will build on examples from around the
world to show what such measures might look like in the future and to discuss how the new
paradigm might best be achieved.
About the speaker
David Balmforth is an Executive Technical Director with the international engineering company MWH, which he joined in 1999. He is an accomplished civil engineer specialising in flood risk management and urban pollution control. Formerly an academic, his recent work ranges from the delivery of £multimillion 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. Formerly a non-Executive director of the Construction Industry Research and Information Association and Editor of the Journal of Flood Risk Management, David is now a visiting professor at Imperial College and President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
All are welcome to attend this free lecture and no booking is required. Contact Jane Sherrard (email: jane.sherrard@ice.org.uk / tel: 01752 766239) at ICE South West for further information.