BOSTON, November 15, 2013—Duane Morris is pleased to announce that it is a Founding Sponsor of the National Institute for Coastal and Harbor Infrastructure Symposium, the first-ever national conference on state and local coastal adaptation plans. It was held November 12 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Boston Harbor.
The Symposium signifies the launch of the first national campaign to build a broad national coalition of private and public interests to advocate for a federally funded national interstate coastal and harbor infrastructure system that addresses the triple threat of rising sea levels, increasing storm severity and aging infrastructure by integrating and funding state and regional coastal climate adaptation plans. The event featured speakers from Boston, New York, New Jersey, Norfolk, Va., southeastern Florida, New Orleans and San Francisco. Also present were attendees from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as the U.S. Department of Transportation and its Maritime Administration agency.
Paul Josephson, a host of the conference, is a Duane Morris partner credited with many infrastructure fixes in New Jersey and a NICHI board member. He introduced Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, Senior Scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Co-Chair of Mayor Bloomberg's Climate Change Commission, as the event's keynote science speaker. Josephson has been selected to serve on a three-member Executive Committee of the NICHI Board in spearheading the organization's national coastal infrastructure campaign.
"We looked at the figures: over $51 billion and counting just to clean up from Sandy, and even more after Katrina," Josephson said. "We continue to respond to this crisis with a reactive cycle of local and regional disaster relief, regularly repairing our 20th-century infrastructure at great cost in lives and property. Instead, we need to develop and fund a proactive national program that allows our cities and states to develop a national 21st-century coastal adaptation plan that also creates economic development opportunities."
Attendees at the conference included private sector participants from engineering, law, real estate, insurance, finance, banking, utilities, organized labor and academia, as well as officials from state and local governmental agencies.
The Symposium is the first of three national Symposia, including a Symposium to be held in Lower Manhattan next year focusing on the role of the private sector, and culminating in a third Symposium in Washington, D.C. focused on specific policy and funding initiatives. Regional forums are also expected to be held around the country during the course of 2014.
For more information, visit http://www.nichiusa.org/
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