The Geo-Resilience 2023 Conference was a great success

The Geo-Resilience 2023 Conference was a great success

The Geo-Resilience 2023 conference was the third in a series of biennial conferences organised by the BGA. It was held at Cardiff University in the Centre for Student Life from 28-29^th March 2023. It was preceded by the BGA’s Cooling Prize event that was held at the same venue on the evening of 27^th March 2023, hosted by the ICE Wales Cymru Ground Engineering Group.

The Geo-Resilience 2023 conference was a great success and attended by 174 delegates. More than 40% of attendees were below the age of 35. This can be attributed to the successful outcome of the BGA’s efforts to encourage attendance by early career professionals (by offering a reduced registration fee) and free places for students (supported by sponsor BAM Ritchies and the BGA).

Keynote presentations were given by:

• Savina Carluccio (International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure) on “Scaling up Infrastructure Resilience”;
• Rhona Marsland (Office for Road and Rail) on “Regulating Resilience”;
• Youssef Hashash (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) on “Resilience of Geosystems using Functional Recovery Frameworks”; and
• Sam Deeley (Welsh Government) on “Coal Tip Safety and Climate Change Resilience”.

46 papers were presented at the conference under the themes “Resilience of Road Networks”, “Resilience of Earthworks”, “Wetting and Drying Processes”, “Sustainability”, “Uncertainty and Probabilistic Processes”, Resilience to Flooding and Coastal Hazards” and “Remote Sensing, Data and Monitoring”.

The BGA would like to thank the conference sponsors: Platinum Sponsor – Blackwell Earthmoving, Gold Sponsors – Arcadis and Asterra and Silver Sponsors – RocScience, Concrete Canvas and Fugro, with additional sponsorship items supported by Tensar, BAM Ritchie, OGI and the Geological Society.

The conference dinner was held in Cardiff Castle and was a truly memorable evening.