On January 25, Columbia Global Centers | Beijing invited Jeff Schlegelmilch, Deputy Director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness to deliver a presentation on Planning for Urban Disaster Resilience, followed by a panel discussion featuring special guests Dr. Jianhua Xu, Associate Professor of Department of Environmental Management at College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University and Dr. Xiaoli Lyu, Associate Director at Tsinghua's Center for Crisis Management Research.
During the presentation, Mr. Schlegelmilch talked about the mission, function and vision of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, an "academic-based think tank" that works to understand and improve the nation's capacity to prepare for, respond to and recover from disaster, as well as focusing on system readiness, disaster recovery, culture and engagement and vulnerable populations. He featured some important research and efforts of Columbia in building new paradigms for resilience, as well as touched upon the lessons and initiatives of other organizations working to build sustainable communities. Mr. Schlegelmilch introduced several ongoing projects of NCDP such as the RCRC (Resilient Children/ Resilient Communities Initiative) which is co-partnered with Save the Children to develop a model for child-focused disaster planning targeted towards communities. He stressed that children is one of their main focuses since "we are talking about multi-generational problems. We are not going to figure it out in our lifetime, which means we need our future generations to have the resources and education to thrive, to be able to pick up what we leave off."