ERA to Sponsor Opening Keynote of NIBS Annual Conference and Expo
The EPDM Roofing Association (ERA) is starting off the New Year by sponsoring the opening Keynote of the National Institute of Building Sciences’ (NIBS) Annual Conference and Expo. The Keynote speech at the NIBS event will be delivered by Eric Wilson, Deputy Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, and will showcase recent efforts to enhance resilience in the city. The Keynote will be followed by a session on “Resilience: Learning from the Past, Adapting to the Future”, examining the lessons learned from the 2017 Hurricane Season as well as the impact of climate change on the need for resilient buildings.
The National Institute of Building Sciences was established by Congress in 1974 to gather representatives from both the public and private sectors to “identify and resolve problems and potential problems that hamper the construction of safe, affordable structures for housing, commerce and industry” in the United States. At last year’s conference, NIBS released its Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2017 Interim Report which found that mitigation funding can save the nation $6 in future disaster costs, for every $1 spent on hazard mitigation.
ERA’s support of the Keynote at NIBS is the latest in the association’s ongoing efforts to raise awareness of the need for resilience in the built environment. Last month, the ERA released its first annual report on resilience, “Building Resilience: The Roofing Perspective.” The report focuses on events during the past calendar year, and includes sections on cataclysmic weather events and their impact; policy responses, especially those recommending spending on mitigation; and legislative initiatives. Additional sections focus on state-of- the-art approaches to building a resilient roofing system, and include an index of additional sources of in- depth information on resilience.
The full text of the report can be found on the ERA microsite, EpdmTheResilientRoof.org.
The NIBS Conference will be held from January 7-10 at the Mandarin Hotel in Washington, DC. For further information, go to https://www.nibs.org/page/conference2019.