The University of Salford’s THINKlab Director, Professor Terrence Fernando was recently invited by Sri Lanka’s National Building Research Organisation (NBRO)  to make a keynote speech at their 10th Annual Research Symposium on Equitable Resilience.

The event took place on 17 and 18 December 2019 at the Hotel Galadari in Colombo and was attended by more than 400 delegates who are involved with disaster risk reduction activities across Sri Lanka. Senior dignitaries included Major General Kamal Gunaratne, the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence who was the chief guest, and Trine Jøranli Eskedal, the Ambassador for the Royal Norwegian Embassy who was the guest of honour.

The theme of the symposium was ‘Equitable Resilience’ and Professor Fernando’s keynote speech highlighted the importance of ‘Technology Enhanced Adaptive Governance to Support Equitable Resilience.’ The keynote included findings and recommendations from both the MOBILISE and TRANSCEND projects where Professor Fernando is the Principal Investigator of each project and leads a team of partners in UK, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Pakistan. Funded by UKRI (EPSRC, ESRC) and Global Challenges Research Fund, the MOBILISE project focuses on LMIC communities in disaster prone areas who are regularly affected by natural disasters such as flooding, landslides and earthquakes and the TRANSCEND project focuses on risk sensitive urban development and equitable resilience.  

During the symposium, Prof Fernando launched the MOBILISE platform which has been donated to the Disaster Management Centre and NBRO for enhancing the disaster risk reduction and disaster response activities in Sri Lanka.

The two-day event included panel discussions with industry experts and academics who contributed their experiences across the field of disaster reduction. The technical sessions discussed landslide risk reduction and building research which are aligned with the NBRO’s key objectives.

The event was jointly organised by the NRBO, The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC), NITTOC Construction, NIPPON KOEI Co, Engineering & Laboratory Services Ltd and the University of Salford as the academic partner.

Further reading: http://www.defence.lk/Article/view_article/778