Resilience - the ability of systems, assets, and services to cope with or quickly recover from disruptive events - is in its own right a critical issue for society. Climate change extremes, natural and man-made events/disasters, resource scarcity, cyber security, and so on, mean that resilience of infrastructure has become critical to the continuity of the services we rely on at one level and maintaining the fabric of society at another.
And so Resilience is a critical issue for Society and Engineers - it needs increased awareness, imagination, and focus. Hence MWH is delighted to co-support a series of prestige annual lectures focusing on the crucial importance of infrastructure resilience for the developing and developed world. The first lecture was held at the ICE’s One Great George Street headquarters on 1 December and the lecture series has been developed through a partnership of the Institution of Civil Engineers, MWH and Heriot Watt University.
The inaugural lecture was opened by MWH Global strategy director David A. Smith who expressed the crucial role great engineers need to play in bringing the foresight, intelligence and imagination to solve complex resilience challenges and maintain the fabric of society. He also talked about ‘Just in case’, ‘Just about’, and ‘Just in time’ as the new challenge for the Engineer. What should we solve through increased ‘Just in case’ investment in greater levels of protection? What should we solve through wider ‘Just about’ thinking like changing people behaviours or adapting the wider system? And what should we solve through increased ‘Just in time’ response plans to cope in event situations?
Professor Paul Jowitt, Professor of Civil Engineering Systems at Heriot Watt University and past President of the ICE was the key speaker. Professor Jowitt defined resilience as “the ability of a system to withstand or quickly recover from significant disruption”. He went on to highlight the vulnerability of infrastructure across the world, to a range of natural and other threats, the role of engineers in maintaining and creating resilient physical infrastructure, where the financial burden falls, and how we can better prepare for the future.
Attended by many clients of MWH, the lecture was followed by a lively debate chaired by ICE President and MWH executive technical director, David Balmforth. The discussion focused on the critical importance of infrastructure resilience, the challenge of short-term patch and mend versus longer-term solutions, and how the engineering profession can make a real difference.
