DATE: August 11, 2014
MEDIA CONTACT: Dr. Jennifer Jurado, Broward County
Environmental Planning and Community Resilience Division
PHONE: 954-520-1086
EMAIL: jjurado@broward.org

BROWARD COUNTY, FL - The Dutch, like Southeast Floridians, know something about living at, or below, sea level. For the next three days, stakeholders from Southeast Florida will join Dutch, national, and local experts in a collaborative design effort to improve Florida’s ability to withstand sea level rise caused by climate change. 

The event, titled the Southeast Florida Resilient Redesign, is co-hosted by the four-County Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, the Miami chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Miami Center for Architecture and Design.

Approximately 50 experts, from the diverse fields of architecture, civil engineering, transportation, urban development, hydrology, environmental planning, and hazard preparedness will analyze climate challenges and design opportunities for three Southeast Florida landscapes.

Locations include the barrier island setting of Alton Road in Miami Beach, a commercial corridor along East Dania Beach Boulevard in Broward County, and a suburban community in unincorporated Miami-Dade County. 

“We are privileged to benefit from the expertise of so many renowned design professionals and engineers who are converging on south Florida for this event,” expressed Dr. Jennifer Jurado, Director of Broward County’s Environmental Planning and Community Resilience Division and a member of the organizing committee, “Many of these same individuals were key participants in the award-winning community design initiatives that followed Hurricane Katrina and Super Storm Sandy. Today we are building upon these lessons and through proactive planning and investments are jointly working to improve the resilience of our communities here in South Florida.”

Each of the three study areas represents characteristics common throughout the region so that design strategies identified during the workshop will serve as resilience models for many communities in South Florida. The models developed will drive planning and infrastructure investments that serve an ultimate community resiliency strategy with well-developed design concepts that can be integrated into development and redevelopment opportunities. This type of coordinated effort in resilience helps to improve the integrity of infrastructure and the safety of communities by reducing risk to flooding and other climate hazards and the potential for severe economic losses and disruptions.

Teams will tour the three targeted sites and then participate in an intense design session that will tackle the infrastructure and planning adaptations required to deal with sea level rise, severe storms, and storm surge, along with the preservation of historic and community character and the prominent integration of green infrastructure. 

The South Florida Resilient Redesign Workshop is part of a series of regional gatherings organized around the priority recommendations of the Regional Climate Action Plan, developed and adopted by Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties as partners to the 4-County Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact (Compact).

This three day event is supported by the Institute for Sustainable Communities and the Kresge Foundation. Design outcomes from the Southeast Florida Resilient Redesign Workshop will be presented at the Compact’s 6th Annual Southeast Florida Regional Climate Leadership Summit on October 1-2, 2014 in Miami Beach.

For more information on the Summit or the Compact, visit http://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org