The Mulvehill Monologues, Part I

As a public service, I am having a transcription made of Commissioner Mulvehill's presentation on her trip to Bonn, Germany.  In May she attended the ICLEI conference where she made a presentation to 100 people.  This is the report that she gave last night at the City Commission meeting.  It is being delivered in multiple parts as the transcription proves to be a challenging task:  Here we go:

OK, just to give you some information on the conference I attended in Bonn, Germany, in May. There were 371 participants from 44 different countries, 217 speakers from 5 continents and 62 local government representatives from 26 cities. Some of the key themes of the conference were with regards to disaster risk reduction and resiliency approaches. And, part of what we just talked about earlier tonight about urban gardening and, hmm, urban agriculture, recreation, our portability resilience, we'll talk about that in a minute. Community based risk assessments which is really getting input from the community on how we prevent risk, how we prevent, hmm, different problems from happening, hmm, disaster, risk basically. Strategic collaborative partnerships, and I'll give you some examples of those that, ahh, we learned about at the conference. Integrating food security and urban agriculture into resilient communities as I just mentioned. And, probably one of the key themes was how to pay for it. So, this was really a global issue that was discussed at this conference with the 44 countries of how do we pay for it? And, hmm, resilience, what is resilience? It's the capacity and the ability of the community to withstand stress, survive, adapt, and bounce back from a crisis or disaster and rapidly move forward, and, just a second (giggling), hmmm, and this type of this crisis this is what we're having in the United States, financial, crisis, recession, it could be, hmmm, disaster, man-made disaster, it could be national disaster, but it's become more prominent as we look as we, go to the next slide, Pam please. If you look at this map, this, ahhh, graph here you can't really see what the blue (unintellilgible) is natural disasters that have been going up since the seventies. You can see the increase. And we hear about that. Tsunamis, you hear about floods, we have hurricanes, I mean, there is a trend when you look at it that we are experiencing worldwide more national disasters. And the grey is man-made disasters. So, that is how, how, if you look at things like fires and hmm, that we do ourselves, committing a fire or, you know, you even wonder about the hurricanes, the hurricanes, that hit in Louisiana when the dams broke, you know, is that a combination of a man-made and a natural disaster... 

 More to follow...

This is reposted from August 2012. Thank you Micheal Buczyner for letting us recall this moment in Lake Worth history. This is the first of five parts. I will be publishing the rest during the next few days.