Public Lecture on Planning for Urban Disaster Resilience

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."

In the following discussion moderated by Mr. Schlegelmilch, Dr.Jianhua Xu and Dr. Xiaoli Lyu further shared their understanding of the scope and definition of disaster resilience and elaborated on the projects and research that they have been involved with in related fields. They also highlighted a few points such as the important role of communications in building a resilient community as Mr. Schlegelmilch mentioned in his presentation and several good examples of such communities in China.  

More than 25 people attended the event and actively engaged in the discussion during the Q&A session. More than 88,000 people watched the live stream of the event.