Professor Perry Yang of the Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Architecture was invited to chair and speak at the concluding session of the Workshop of Urban Resilience at the University of Tokyo. The event was organized by the Global Carbon Project and the University of Tokyo, and took place December 7-10, 2015.

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) (http://www.cger.nies.go.jp/gcp/) is one of the joint projects of the Future Earth initiative (www.futureearth.org). The project seeks to develop effective responses to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change and to support increased global sustainability in the coming decades. The GCP provides the Global Carbon Atlas, an online platform to explore, visualize, and interpret global and regional carbon data arising from both human activities and natural processes. The Atlas is a community effort under the umbrella of the GCP, and is based on the contributions of many research institutions and individual scientists who make observations, models, and interpretation skills accessible. (http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/?q=en/content/welcome-carbon-atlas )

The GCP’s 2015 workshop focused on tools and indicators for assessing urban resilience. GCP aims to utilize resilience thinking as a guiding principle while bringing together scholars from different disciplines to develop an integrated framework for assessing urban community resilience, especially in Asia-Pacific cities. Professor Yang delivered a talk on energy resilient urban systems from a design perspective. He addressed how an interventional approach should be integrated in energy resilient modeling through urban design in order to address complex urban system problems during uncertain and unpredictable shocks induced by climate or environmental disasters.  Yang highlighted the tsunami that caused the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 as an example of this, and discussed the flooding from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Other featured speakers were Dr. Yoshiki Yamagata, the Head of Global Carbon Project of Tsukuba International Office, and Professor Xuemei Bai, the Scientific Committee Member of the Future Earth and the coordinator of the Urban Knowledge Network (UKAN). The four-day workshop concluded a resilience assessment framework that can now be used by planners and decision makers to encourage informed decisions. More details can be found in the GCP workshop program.