Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction to host workshop on flood and drought

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) will be hosting a workshop on flood and drought as part of its next Friday Forum series.

The workshop, titled Flood and Drought: What is next for Watershed Management?, will be held on Oct. 16 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. The forum will feature Kim Sturgess, the founder and CEO of Alberta WaterSMART, a services organization committed to improving water management through better technologies and practices.

The workshop will focus on Alberta’s “Great Flood” of June 2013, which affected countless families, homes, businesses, properties, infrastructures and landscapes. Background information from the ICLR noted that, more recently, agricultural communities in southern and central Alberta were faced with water shortages, resulting in Alberta declaring a province-wide agricultural disaster in late August 2015.

“As the events of recent years have shown, water-related events have had a profound impact on the lives of Albertans,” the information said. “As the Government of Alberta leads the effort to examine and implement a variety of long-term flood and drought mitigation considerations, it is important to drive water-related discussions and public engagement on the topics of water resources, water management and flood and drought mitigation.”

The ICLR said that over the last 10 years, there has been a growing interest in collaborative watershed management, including the development of tools and models to incorporate new research, data and climate change impacts. These collaborative practices are providing new insights for flood and drought to address issues of climate adaptation. The workshop will review how these practices and lessons learned from the extreme weather events in Alberta.

The ICLR information noted that Sturgess (pictured left) has led the development of collaborative watershed management models and systems over the last 10 years and has supported water management planning in industry and government. Her team provided advisory services and public education for the Alberta government following the 2013 flood.

In addition to serving on the boards of her own companies, Sturgess serves on the boards of CCI Thermal Technologies, the Calgary Airport Authority, the Alberta Chamber of Resources and the Council of Canadian Academies. Formerly she served as director of the Alberta Water Council, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the National Research Council, APEGA, the Alberta Economic Development Authority, Queen’s University and the Calgary Science Centre.

The workshop is available by Webex only.

RSVP: Tracy Waddington

Webex: https://iclr.webex.com/iclr/onstage/g.php?MTID=e656a67dbeac75ecb17a74a3a7290dc86

Password: flood

Conference Call number:

Local: 416-343-2657

Toll free: 1-866-440-8938

Conference ID: 1712397#