51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Resilient, Renewable Society (RRS) Summit  

Date: 16 September 
Time: 09:00&²Ô»å²¹²õ³ó;17:00 
Location: Royal Society, SW1Y 5AG  

DAY 1 at Royal Society: What are the painful societal resilience lessons we've learned? What do they tell us about our future, and what can we do about it? 

09:00-09:20 | Registration and Networking Coffee 

09:20–09:30 | Welcome and Opening Remarks 
Professor Washington Ochieng, CBE, EBS, CEng, FREng, FCGI (Director of CARS, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø) 
Avi Schnurr (Chairman of the Board and CEO, EIS Council)

09:30–11:05 Session 1 | Natural Disaster Preparedness 
This session examines how societies can strengthen preparedness for climate-related and other natural hazards before disruption occurs. It focuses on the relationships between risk governance, local adaptive capacity, critical infrastructure, community resilience, and public preparedness. By combining UK and LMIC perspectives, the session will explore how institutions can move from forecasting and planning to practical action that protects people, services, and systems. 

09:30–09:45 | Keynote: Heat and Resilience: Preparing Society for Our Fastest-Growing Climate Risk 
Professor Emma Howard Boyd (Chair, National Heat Risk Commission) 

09:45–10:00 | Keynote: Living with Compound Risk: Livelihood Vulnerability, Institutional Erosion, and the Social Foundations of Disaster Preparedness in Ghana's Savannah Zone 
Professor Joseph Awetori Yaro (Provost, College of Humanities, University of Ghana) 

10:00–10:10 | Breather 

10:10–10:50 | Panel 1 Discussion
Panel Chair: Matt Killick (Chief Operating Officer, St John Ambulance) 
Panellists:  

• Professor Brian Collins, CB, FREng (Vice Chairman, National Preparedness Commission) 
• Dr Daniela Fecht (Associate Professor in Geospatial Health, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø) 
• Andrew O'Neil (Founder & Senior Risk and Resilience Advisor, Operational Outcomes Advisory) 
• Toby Wicks (CEO, REACT) 

10:50–11:05 | Keynote: Defence, Resilience and Sustainability: How we can utilise technology and nature to make this country safer and stronger 
Lieutenant General (Retd) Richard Nugee CB CVO CBE 

11:05–11:25 | Coffee Break 

11:25–12:45 Session 2 | Human Miscalculations and Energy Systems Resilience 
This session explores how human error, governance failures, planning assumptions, and system complexity can amplify disruption across energy systems, public services, and communities. It will examine resilience not only as a technical problem, but also as a question of leadership, coordination, finance, public trust, the design of public services, and place-based approaches. The discussion aims to identify how energy systems and the communities they serve can become more robust, adaptive, inclusive, and socially legitimate in the face of outages and cascading failures. 

11:25–11:40 | Keynote: System resilience and preparedness requires a whole-of-society and whole-of-government response 
Lord Toby Harris (Chair, National Preparedness Commission) 

11:40–12:20 | Panel 2 Discussion
Panel Chair:  Professor Rosehanna Chowdhury (CEO, UK Resilience Academy) 
Panellists:

• Ian Fox (Founder & Director, Safer Spaces For All CIC) 
• Dr Ehud Ganani (Vice President, Strategic Programs, EIS Council) 
• Helen Goulden OBE (Innovation & Partnerships Lead, Lloyds Banking Group)  
• Dr Sally Leivesley (Managing Director, Newrisk Limited) 

12:20–12:35 | Keynote: Resilience demands partnership, and partnership delivers resilience: Strengthening resilience through shared leadership and learning 
Dr Deborah Petterson (Director Resilience & Emergency Management, National Energy System Operator) 

12:35–13:40 | Lunch Break 

13:40–15:05 Session 3 | Manmade Hazards, Emerging Threats, and Geopolitical Risk
This session considers how emerging threats—including cyberattacks, AI-related risks, operational disruption, and geopolitical instability—challenge societal and infrastructure resilience. It explores how resilience frameworks must adapt to a threat environment shaped by digital dependence, strategic competition, and increasingly interconnected systems. Bringing together cyber, defence, policy, and operational perspectives, the session asks how societies can anticipate, withstand, and recover from threats that are fast-moving, hard to predict, and potentially systemic in impact. 

13:40–13:55 | Keynote: Infrastructure Risk and Resilience in a Shifting Geopolitical Landscape 
Amb. Dr Hoffman Ronen (President, EIS Council) 

13:55–14:10 | Keynote: Emerging Technologies and Risks: Perspectives from LMIC 
Professor Jerry John Kponyo (Director/Office of Grants and Research, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology) 

14:10–14:50 | Panel Discussion 
Panel Chair:  Professor Bryan Wells (Chair of the Board of Directors, The von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics) 

±Ê²¹²Ô±ð±ô±ô¾±²õ³Ù²õ: &²Ô²ú²õ±è;

• Dr Chris Beck (Chief Scientist & Vice President for Policy, EIS Council) 
• Hannah Gurga (Director General of the ABI) 
• Professor Chris Hankin (Director, Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-Physical Systems (RITICS)) 
• Professor MaÅ‚gorzata Zachara-SzymaÅ„ska (Professor of International Relations, Jagiellonian University) 

14:50–15:05 | Keynote: Is Britain Safe? 
Rt Hon Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen KT, GCMG  
Chancellor of the University of Dundee 

15:05–15:20 | Coffee Break 

15:20–16:20 Final Plenary | Pulling the Threads Together 
The closing plenary draws together the major themes of the day to reflect on what resilience should mean in practice for societies undergoing environmental, technological, and geopolitical change. Moving from community-scale design to national coordination, it explores how resilience can be strengthened through enabling infrastructure, practical partnerships, and more integrated approaches across government, industry, and society. 

15:20-15:35 Keynote: Resilience Begins at Home: Smart Multigenerational Neighbourhoods and the Future of AI-Enabled Community Infrastructure 
Professor Ian Spero (Founder, Agile Ageing Alliance; Convenor, ISO 25553) 

15:35–16:15 | Panel Discussion 
Panel Chair: Professor Deeph Chana (Professor of Practice, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø) 
Panellists:  

• Tony Charge (Founder and President, Australian Risk Policy Institute) 
• Rick Cudworth (Board & Executive Director at Resilience First) 
• Professor Caroline Field (Co-Founder & Executive Director, Centre for Whole of Society Resilience) 

16:15-16:30 Keynote: Roger Hargreaves, Director, COBR Directorate 

16:30–16:40 | Closing Remarks 
Professor Washington Ochieng, CBE, EBS, CEng, FREng, FCGI  
Avi Schnurr 

16:40-17:00 | Networking  

Resilient, Renewable Society (RRS) Summit  

Date: 17 September 
Time: 09:00&²Ô»å²¹²õ³ó;17:00 
Location: Electrical & Electronic Building, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø, SW7 2AZ

DAY 2 at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College: From Challenge to Implementation: Workshops, Simulation, and Summit Action 

09:00-09:20 | Registration and Networking Coffee 

09:20-09:35 | Welcome Back and Day 1 Recap in Electrical & Electronic Engineering Building Room 408 Plenary 
Professor Washington Ochieng, CBE, EBS, CEng, FREng, FCGI 
Avi Schnurr 

09:35-09:45 | Expert Remarks 
Jim Robb (President and CEO, North American Electric Reliability Corporation) 

09:45–12:30 | Parallel Workshops in Electrical & Electronic Engineering Building Rooms 403A, 403B, 406 
Format: three parallel workshop tracks 
Overall workshop purpose: 
Each workshop should build directly on the real-world cases and discussions from Day 1 and focus on generating actionable ideas, stronger networks, and potential collaborations. The workshops aim to produce concise outputs that can feed the simulation and closing implementation panel. 

Workshop Track 1 Natural Disaster Preparedness 
¹ó´Ç³¦³Ü²õ: Translating risk, adaptation, and preparedness lessons into operational and partnership models 
This workshop examines how societies can strengthen preparedness for flood, drought, and extreme heat under deep climate uncertainty. It focuses on the relationships between risk governance, local adaptive capacity, critical infrastructure, community resilience, and the funding and partnership models needed to deliver change. Through an interactive format that works backwards from shared resilience goals, the session will explore how institutions can move from risk and adaptation lessons to practical, operational action that protects people, services, and systems. 

Workshop Track 2 Leveraging Insurance to Enable and Finance Resilient Energy Systems  
Focus: Identifying governance, technical, financing, and organisational measures to improve energy resilience 
This workshop brings together stakeholders from the energy, finance, insurance, and policy communities to explore how innovative financial and insurance mechanisms can support the development of resilient energy systems in the face of growing climate and operational risks. Building on prior discussions from the IEA–CDRI, 51³Ô¹ÏÍø Grantham Institute workshop in October 2025 in Paris, the session is structured in two parts: first, to identify key climate risks, system vulnerabilities, and emerging technological and financing solutions; and second, to examine how insurance and risk transfer mechanisms can unlock investment, strengthen resilience, and enable effective public–private collaboration. Through interactive discussions, participants will generate shared insights on priority risks, resilience interventions, and financing needs, alongside practical recommendations for policy, partnership models, and investment strategies to advance resilient energy infrastructure. 

Workshop Track 3: How can societies, critical infrastructure systems and trusted data ecosystems remain resilient when confronted by increasingly interconnected, intelligent and systemic threats? 
Focus: Strengthening resilience against cyberattacks, AI-related risks, strategic disruption, and cascading operational failures 
This workshop examines how societies can strengthen resilience to cyber, AI, geopolitical, and operational threats in an increasingly connected world, while addressing the Cyber Poverty Gap that leaves organisations, communities, and sectors with unequal capability to participate safely and securely in digital systems. It focuses on the relationships between systemic risk, trusted data ecosystems, critical infrastructure, collaborative governance, and the funding and capability-building models needed to reduce vulnerability and build resilience. Through an interactive format that works backwards from shared resilience goals, the session will explore how institutions can move from understanding capability disparities and emerging threats to practical, operational action that protects people, services, and systems from cascading risks across an interconnected geopolitical landscape. 

12:30–13:30 | Lunch Break 

13:30–15:00 | Simulation Exercise 
¹ó´Ç°ù³¾²¹³Ù: plenary interactive exercise in Electrical & Electronic Engineering Room 408 
Duration: 1.5 hours 
GINOM: Stress-Testing Resilience 
The simulation tests how well the lessons from Day 1 and the ideas generated in the workshops hold up under time pressure, uncertainty, and interdependent system stress.  A high-impact, simulation-driven exercise, where participants will confront real-world uncertainty, make critical decisions under pressure, and immediately see how their choices shape the behaviour of complex, interconnected systems. 

15:00–15:15 | Coffee Break 

15:15–16:15 | Implementing the Vision 
Title: From Ideas to Action: Delivering Resilience Through Working Groups and Partnerships 
Format: plenary in Electrical & Electronic Engineering Room 408 
Purpose: This closing session will provide updates from the RRS workshop groups and identify where collaboration, piloting, and follow-up action are most needed. 

1. Implementing Group 
- Reporting back from the workshops and simulation exercises 
- Synthesis from Workshop Facilitators and simulation findings on emergency communications, resilience and redundancy, and capabilities. 

2. Discussion on: 
- Where are the biggest delivery barriers? 
- What are the most actionable ideas emerging from Day 2? 
- How do we sustain momentum beyond the summit? 

16:15–16:30 | Final Reflections and Close 
Professor Washington Ochieng, CBE, EBS, CEng, FREng, FCGI 
Avi Schnurr