The scope and increasing scale of disasters is a serious national challenge. Leaders on the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) have been charged with advising the White House on how to reduce risk and improve the security and resilience of our nation’s infrastructure and communities. The NIAC recently invited Dr. Todd Bridges, Professor of Practice in UGA’s College of Engineering and Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS) to share his thoughts and recommendations on disaster response and resilience.
Drawing on his decades of experience with the Army, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and at the University of Georgia, Bridges spoke with members of the committee for an hour about his perspectives and recommendations for building a more resilient people and planet.
“It was certainly an honor to be invited to share my thoughts with leaders who have been charged by the President to make recommendations for moving our country forward on resilience. Hurricane Helene and its wide-ranging impacts from the Gulf Coast to the Appalachian Mountains was the most recent reminder of how complex and serious the problem is,” Bridges said of the meeting.
Bridges spoke directly to the role of universities and commitments that UGA has made to support national-scale resilience. “Opportunities like this are important for many reasons, including the opportunity they provide to tell the story of what we are doing at UGA through IRIS, and to invite others to join us in the cause. We’ve committed ourselves with collaborators across the university and beyond to create a workforce of the future, a resilient people and planet, and security through nature-positive engineering.”
He also spoke to the urgent and long-term need to convene and collaborate across sectors to advance national policy and practice at all levels. “There are no easy fixes for these ‘wicked problems’. But there are short-term steps we can commit ourselves to that will put us on the long-term path to resilience.”
Learn more about IRIS’s mission to build a resilient people and planet here.