Samantha Howard presents her Honours and early Masters results at the Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference in Halifax, Oct 5, 2022
The last week was a busy one. I enjoyed doing a guest talk for the University of Massachussets at Amherst’s ECo Seminar series last Friday. I updated my 2020 keynote for IASNR, including insights from Samantha Howard’s Honours and Masters surveys on flood risk mapping. Thanks to Jesse Caputo and Brett Butler for the invitation to spend more time reflecting on what I’ve been learning about climax thinking over the past few years of empirical exploration.
This week I squeezed the Atlantic Flood Mapping Conference into my week. On Wednesday, Samantha presented her work to a remarkable assemblage of government, NGO, consulting, academic and other experts in the technology and human dimensions of flood risk and hazard mapping. We could hardly have asked for a more appropriate audience. On the Thursday, after my class, I took part in the workshop component of the event. As part of one of those sessions, I presented some of the social science principles that underlie public resistance to flood risk or hazard mapping, to set the stage for breakout groups on best practices in communication. I included in my presentation media analysis work done by former MREM M.J. Valiquette (funded by CBCL) to inform their flood mapping guidelines for Nova Scotia municipalities. Unfortunately, my session at this event conflicted with the book launch for Power of Landscape in the Netherlands, which I was sorry to miss.
The end of the day on Thursday, I was delighted to have an (uninterrupted) talk with Jeff Douglas, on CBC Mainstreet NS, about managed retreat. They quoted from my last blog post to get things started, but the conversation was fun and wide-ranging. You can have a listen here.
