On August 26th and 27th, the University of Georgia Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems team and partners at Pew Charitable Trusts welcomed the 2025 State Resilience Planning Group Convening to campus for an event that connected state officials and experts from non-profit, academic and federal sectors from around the country.
Over the span of two days, participants brainstormed new ideas for measuring and communicating the costs and benefits of resilience projects, funding innovative projects, and weaving natural infrastructure and resilience into infrastructure development at the state-level.
This included several talks, including the Measuring the Benefits and Making the Case Panel, where panelists discussed the importance of making a case for the role of natural solutions in building resilient communities.
Heather Tallis, Senior Fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz, was quoted during this panel on the many existing efforts that can serve as precedence for the best ways–and the value of–building resilience.
“There’s a lot of precedent now–it might not be in your state or the risk you’re working on, it might not be something you can immediately move on today–but there are so many examples now of cases where nature has been brought to reduce risk for communities and where both state and federal policies have changed to open those doors and make it easier. Not all of that is in a pretty perfect picture, especially today, but I want to leave you with the encouragement and inspiration that we have a lot to build from.”
Marshall Shepherd, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor and IRIS Associate Director, gave the lunch address, where he spoke to the importance of bipartisan collaboration and the complexities of cascading disasters recently spotlighted in the Georgia Statewide Resilience Report.
“What we found in this report is that many jurisdictions were prepared for the hurricane, they were prepared for a heat wave or a flood, but they weren’t prepared for the multiple cascading and complex interactions that come from the main event…those are the complexities that we were advocating for people to think about.”
Finally, participants joined the IRIS team for a tabletop exercise–where they had the opportunity to put their theories into action as they discussed the best ways to implement resilience planning on a spatial and temporal scale based on mapped simulations–before they stepped outside for a field trip led by Michael Wharton, the Athens Clarke County Sustainability Officer and Zak Ruehman, IRIS Director of Engineering Services, through Athens to examine natural infrastructure concepts in the wild.
“The field trip provided an opportunity for people to see the North Oconee Greenway system,” said Ruehman of the trip. “[This] is an exemplar of how strategic development can lead to the realization of the inherent value that natural assets such as rivers and floodplains provide while also minimizing the risks to public health and safety.”
The IRIS team was honored to serve as hosts for this annual convening. To learn more about the State Resilience Planning Group, check out the Pew Charitable Trusts write up here.