In a recent article published in UGA Today, IRIS affiliate Dr. Marshall Shepherd and Director Dr. Brian Bledsoe, spoke to the need for more resilient infrastructure in the face of massive rain events, rising sea levels, and urban sprawl.
“You think about a rubber band—a rubber band has resiliency. It snaps back,” Shepherd was quoted as saying in the article. “In this new era of new rainstorms and more intense hurricanes, we need to be thinking about more climate-resilient systems.”
IRIS’s mission is to advance the integration of natural and conventional infrastructure systems to strengthen long-term resilience to flooding, sea level rise, drought and more. With an approach that is rooted in innovative, collaborative research, Bledsoe, Shepherd and the other IRIS affiliates are working to find new ways to increase our climate-resilience.
“As engineers, we’ve been trained to look to the past in order to predict the future,” said Bledsoe. “What we have to ask when developing solutions for these problems is what the rainfall might be like in the future. What’s the urban landscape probably going to look like in the future? For hurricanes, what’s the storm surge probably going to look like in the future?”