Future Ready Features: Community Impact Edition

The heart of community is its people. Likewise, our people are the heart of WSP, and our collective purpose is helping communities achieve their greatest potential for health and safety, connectivity, equity and resilience.

FEMA funds the future of communities

In a previous edition of this newsletter, we noted that numerous record-breaking disasters across the U.S. totaled over $90 billion in 2023. The loss and damage that results from such events can be catastrophic. And while some things damaged can be restored — buildings, infrastructure, economies — other things lost cannot, such as lives, ecosystems and cultural assets.

As climate change drives more intense and frequent weather events, implementing projects that mitigate the risk of natural hazards to communities, and the built and natural environments that support them, becomes increasingly important. These projects can take a variety of forms, all intended to be lasting solutions that consider changing climatic conditions:

• Hazard mitigation plan development and adoption (required of government agencies to receive federal grant funding).
• Flood protection in the form of permanent barriers, elevation of structures and infrastructure, and drainage improvements including green infrastructure.
• Retrofits to structures, utilities and other infrastructure to increase resilience.
• Slope stabilization to protect against erosion in coastal, waterfront or flood prone areas.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers its Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, describes mitigation planning as “any sustainable action that reduces or eliminates long-term risk to people and property from future disasters” by “breaking the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction and repeated damage.”

Find out how FEMA has made that objective easier for underserved communities.

Enabling equity in community connectivity

We are all about connecting communities. Connecting people to places, people to people, people to the things make their lives full. And for us, that means all people.

Integrating equity into infrastructure development decision-making, helps ensure that the systems we put in place serve all residents fairly. Achieving this objective can ultimately support better quality of life and access to jobs, education and essential services, and can lead to broader economic vitality.

Essential to this process is a deeper understanding of the distinct challenges and needs of each segment of the community, because equity, by its definition, is not a one size fits all solution.

Numerous lenses can be applied to increase the opportunity for equitable transit and transportation services, including sustainability, improved accessibility, technological advances and integrated mobility. But knowing how those can and should be practically applied requires bringing more voices — representing the broad spectrum of a community’s people — to the table.

Therefore, combining innovation with robust community and stakeholder engagement, creates a winning formula to advance the promise of equity in our communities.  

Drones deliver…more than just food

Disaster response and recovery, worker and citizen safety, infrastructure inspections, community engagement, environment and water monitoring, snow depth analysis.

These are just some of the ways in which the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, are positively supporting communities. These, and of course the delivery of everything from food to medical samples.

As the deployment of UAS becomes more and more prevalent across industries, so too do their applications. We are particularly interested in how this evolving technology can support community health, safety, engagement and resilience, such as:

• Emergency response and disaster recovery: Drones can be launched quickly from nearly anywhere, cover large areas and access remote and hard to reach places. They can help inspectors assess damage and support first responders’ situational awareness.
• Environmental protection: We can use drones to support natural resources surveys, and to collect and analyze water samples to identify pollution sources or levels of contamination. They can also be deployed to identify habitat conditions, ecosystem health and changing weather patterns.
• Public awareness and involvement: As we endeavor to drive equity and environmental justice in public infrastructure decision-making, UAS help us tell dynamic stories to disparate populations about proposed projects— what they could look like, and how they may impact and/or benefit their communities.

Of course, there is a distinct expertise required to gain the greatest benefit from this exciting and evolving technology.

Focusing on Future Ready youth

Future Ready is the lens through which WSP views and approaches our work, to ensure the impact we have on our communities is positive and lasting. Fundamentally, it considers changing trends in climate, society, technology and resources, to help us advise and design for today, as well as a future that will look and feel substantially different.

The community we see in our minds eye when we think about the sustainability of our solutions is largely comprised of the youth of today, who may, if we’re lucky, become the Future Ready practitioners of tomorrow. As such, we find it incumbent upon ourselves to be stewards of this way of thinking and engage in education opportunities wherever possible.

Science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education is one enriching and fun avenue to introduce some of the skills we use — and projects we design — to children of various ages and education levels. One group that is particularly fun to interact with is the elementary school aged set, who have an innate curiosity and creativity, and for whom these activities can provide important skills for life, like teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving, project management and building confidence through achievement.

When we can center an educational activity on a real-life challenge or application, and we see the light bulb go on among participants, that’s an exciting moment for them and for us, and hopefully, for the future of Future Ready.