Professor Lord Martin Rees, an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, is one of several leading thinkers set to appear in a series of short films explaining what resilience is, and why it matters, launching this month.

Titled Resilience Engineered and developed by The Resilience Shift in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and SWR Media, the three films present interviews with experts from the world of engineering and climate action, plus thought leaders and those at the forefront of building resilience into infrastructure and the built environment.

The films tackle the most pressing challenges associated with contemporary infrastructure development, covering uncertainty management, risk perception, investment in resilience, and learning from disaster recovery.

Professor Rees is an astrophysicist and cosmologist, and the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at the University of Cambridge, where he has been Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Institute of Astronomy, and is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Ahead of the film series release, he comments, ‘Because things are changing more rapidly than in the past in a number of ways, we can’t be confident that any decision we make will, in retrospect, seem a wise one. On the other hand, we may fail to prepare for a newly emergent threat that wasn’t on our risk register at the time. So we’ve got to accept that planning more than a few decades ahead is much more uncertain than it would have been, say, in medieval times where things change very slowly.’

Learn more about Resilience Engineered via https://www.resilienceshift.org/resilience-engineered/

Watch the trailer of the first film at https://youtu.be/aSRSUPPSUBU