Please join The Risk Institute, The Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Sustainability Institute, and the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering for an event with Mark Stewart, Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, and Director of the Centre for Built Infrastructure Resilience at the University of Technology Sydney.
Event Description:
Terrorism and climate change debates are often characterized by worst-case thinking, cost neglect, probability neglect, and avoidance of the notion of acceptable risk. This is not unexpected when dealing with extreme events. However, it can result in a frightened public, costly policy outcomes, and wasteful expenditures.
This presentation will describe how risk-based approaches are well suited to infrastructure decision-making in a changing climate. Structural reliability, systems modelling, life-cycle assessment, and probabilistic methods are used to model infrastructure performance and resilience, and the cost effectiveness of climate adaptation strategies.
The concepts will be illustrated with current research of risk-based assessment of climate adaptation engineering strategies including designing new houses in Australia subject to cyclones and extreme wind events.
Speaker Bio:
Mark Stewart is a Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, and Director of the Centre for Built Infrastructure Resilience at the University of Technology Sydney. He is an international leader in risk assessment, public policy decision making, and protective infrastructure for extreme hazards. He has applied risk assessment and probabilistic methods to a wide range of infrastructure/engineering systems, including terrorism and climate change. His ideas have been presented in four seminal books and many scientific and engineering papers, and has brought engineering and scientific expertise into the public policy domain. He is the President of the International Association of Protective Structures. Mark recently led a consortium of five universities in Australia for the $3.5 million CSIRO Flagship Cluster Fund project Climate Adaptation Engineering for Extreme Events (CAEx).
