UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 Administrator Samantha Power at the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure Governing Council Meeting

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much, Dr. [P.K.] Mishra. It has been a great honor to serve with you for these past two years as co-chair of the CDRI. And it’s really a privilege to work alongside such a powerful advocate for disaster resilience. This was a gleam in just a few people’s eye, and now it’s a major global force and it’s going to have increasing impact on the ground as it goes deeper in the countries in which it works and offers its expertise.

I’m struck that when it comes to the changing climate, an increasing fatalism is taking hold where people feel almost immobilized by the scale of the challenge, and even have started to take for granted that we’re going to live on a more dangerous and unstable planet. It is easy to fall prey to such fatalism given the gravity of what is coming at particularly vulnerable communities right now. But I credit, really, Dr. Mishra, you, your Indian colleagues, and this group that has gathered because you all are an exception to that fatalism. You have insisted that we can build the world around us in a way that keeps us safe and productive, even with these challenges coming at us.

And my old boss, Barack Obama, used to sometimes chastise me and say, “Sam, stop admiring the problem.” Stop admiring the problem, you have come together to invest in solutions, and to begin building a movement to scale what actually works in building resilience, again, to these very, very powerful forces that are coming at so many communities.

In the two years since I began my co-chairmanship, CDRI has made incredible strides, which Dr. Mishra has just spoken to. We released the world’s ok first Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index, which is really going to be over many, many years in the future, helping countries predict the risks that various disasters pose to them, and their associated average losses. And this will, hopefully, provide advocates for greater investment in climate resilient infrastructure, some of the data and forecasting ammo that they need to secure those resources. So again, it’s hard to change what you cannot measure, this index is really, really important. We formed the Infrastructure Resilience Accelerator Fund, which is a multi-donor trust fund, to support the countries who are most at risk of disaster, yet least able to finance the resilient infrastructure that they need to withstand disaster. So far, the Donor Fund has a commitment of $50 million, but we expect that to grow over time. And we all know, again, how challenging it has proven for the most vulnerable countries and communities to get access to climate finance. So this pool of resources is going to prove very important, again, over time.

Through programs, like the CDRI Fellowship Program, which Dr. Mishra mentioned, fellows around the world are leading efforts to innovate solutions that are addressing real problems in the here and now. For example, in Australia and Sri Lanka, CDRI fellows engineered a groundbreaking fiber optic sensor system to detect water pressures and ground movements in real time. This, of course, helps get earlier warnings out for potential disasters like landslides, so this can be a complete lifesaver. In India, CDRI fellows are pairing satellite data with crowd sourced information on flooding patterns from the citizens who are experiencing floods, to improve, again, flood prediction models, and give communities the early warning they need to stay safer. We want and need to see more of this innovation around the world, we need to see the solutions that work getting used and being iterated and improved. And we need to see those solutions spread to more places.

That’s why last year, I announced a $5 million commitment to establish a partnership between American and Indian institutions of higher education. And today, I’m excited to announce the outcome of that pledge, the CDRI Higher Education Partnership. We are going to be working with universities like Virginia Tech and the Indian Institute of Technology to create curriculum on infrastructure resilience, to offer certification courses for infrastructure management, and to support research that is focused on infrastructure resilience. And as we all know from other sectors, these kinds of education, and fellowship, and scholarship, and training, and certification investments are ones that have ripple effects for generations to come – as people get schooled and trained, and come out and then bring their training to bear within governments, in the private sector and beyond.

Today, CDRI is expanding and it’s demonstrating that more partners than ever are realizing the importance of building the world around us to withstand what we know are coming disasters. In just two years, we’ve seen membership grow from 36 countries to 46 and more countries have expressed interest in joining. So we want to go wide and deep at once. I am eager to see CDRI grow and evolve in the years to come, and it will do so with the leadership of a new incredibly forward thinking chair.

On behalf of the United States, I’m honored to hand over the co-chairmanship of the Governing Council and Executive Committee to France, represented today by Ambassador Aurelian Lechevallier. Ambassador, thank you for stepping into this important role, and thank you for all of your collaboration over the past two years. I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to build a global movement for resilience.

Thank you so much.