The CSIC 2021 Distinguished Lecture will be presented by Professor of Climate and Environmental Risk at the University of Oxford Jim Hall and will take place on Tuesday 13 July.
Registration is now open for this year’s Distinguished Lecture, which concludes a month of events celebrating 10 Years of CSIC. Jim Hall FREng is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks at the University of Oxford and Director of Research at the School of Geography and the Environment. Prof Hall is internationally recognised for his research on risk analysis and decision-making under uncertainty for water resource systems, flood and coastal risk management, infrastructure systems and adaptation to climate change. He was a contributing author to the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Titled 'The data revolution in global-scale analysis of climate risks to infrastructure systems', the Distinguished Lecture will consider impacts of extreme events, like flooding and hurricanes, which can lead to systemic impacts by disrupting supply chains, industries, and communities and make the case for quantifying risk in order to plan, design and manage more resilient systems. The lecture will explore rapidly growing capabilities for analysing infrastructure networks at very large scales, including Earth observation, data from social media platforms and machine learning, which can enable us to geolocate assets and quantify their usage anywhere on Earth. Examples of studies, including one analysing more than 50 million km of OpenStreetMap data and another using billions of satellite Automatic Ship Identification data, will demonstrate how outputs from the analysis are being used for infrastructure adaptation planning, financial risk reporting and disaster risk reduction.
Professor Hall is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology and is Expert Advisor to the National Infrastructure Commission. He is Chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He was a member of the UK independent Committee on Climate Change Adaptation from 2009 to 2019.
Welcoming the announcement, Dr Jennifer Schooling OBE, Director of CSIC, said: “We are delighted to confirm that Professor Jim Hall will be presenting the 2021 Distinguished Lecture which marks 10 Years of CSIC. I cannot think of anyone better to reflect on the need to put the global grand challenges of zero carbon, resource constraint and resilience centre stage in the planning, building, maintaining and operating of our national infrastructure systems. I am very much looking forward to welcoming many of our partners and collaborators.”
Prof Hall's group in the University of Oxford is at the forefront of risk analysis of climatic extremes and their impacts on infrastructure networks and economic systems, from local to global scales. He led the development of the National Infrastructure Systems Model (NISMOD), which was used for the UK's first National Infrastructure Assessment and for analysis of the resilience of energy, transport, digital and water networks in Great Britain. His group developed the first national water resource systems simulation model for England and Wales. Prof Hall conceived of, and now chairs, the UK's Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI). His systems analysis methods have been applied worldwide, including in Argentina, China, Curacao, St Lucia, Tanzania and Vietnam. He has published four books, including, The Future of National Infrastructure: A System-of-Systems Approach, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
• Registration is free and now open. The CSIC 2021 Distinguished Lecture takes place on Tuesday 13 July, 5pm to 6.30pm.
• The CSIC Smart Infrastructure Blog series will feature Professor Hall's blog titled 'Can we measure infrastructure resilience everywjere?' which will be published on the CSIC website on 1 July.