00:00Well, Dina Dialla is the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction
00:04and Professor of Structural Engineering at University College London.
00:08Dina, welcome to the programme.
00:10I want to ask you firstly about ancient sites and older buildings.
00:14How can we protect them from extreme weather?
00:17And what's the cost involved in that?
00:22Well, one example is, for instance,
00:26the Xinjiang Wooden Pagoda in Shanxi, in China,
00:31this is a thousand years old structure that is made entirely of timber
00:36with no connections in nails and everything,
00:40and it has survived numerous earthquakes and numerous wind storms.
00:47So there is much that we can learn from historic structures,
00:51from the Colosseums to the Pyramid and so forth.
00:55They have stood there for thousands of years.
00:59But we need, of course, to understand what is their level of deterioration
01:05and their level of damage as it accumulates through the centuries.
01:10Many of them are not inhabited today,
01:13but many masonry structures or timber structures
01:16that were built three or four hundred years ago
01:18as residential buildings or as public buildings
01:23are still inhabited and similarly for bridges and other infrastructure.
01:28So really, we need to understand what is the next event
01:33that will create a problem for each of these unique structures.
01:40And you were asking about the cost of preserving them.
01:45This will depend very much on the hazards that they face in any given position.
01:54We can use some modern technology that you mentioned in your presentation earlier,
02:01such as foundations, dissipation and so on,
02:09which can help preserving them.
02:13Do you think we could reach a point where there's almost, I suppose,
02:17nothing more that can be done to protect buildings against resilience
02:20when we've kind of tried every engineering and architectural attempt?
02:25Well, I wouldn't think that that's the case.
02:28We can always think about better materials
02:31that will be able to withstand the threat of increasing temperature cycles,
02:41increasing level of rain, increasing moisture around the globe
02:46as climate change is for a task to deliver.
02:50But we can also think about, very importantly,
02:55ways in which we can make our construction industry more sustainable.
03:01The current, let's say, industrialized, modern construction industry
03:07accounts for more than 20% of the carbon that we have, that we produce.
03:14And the transport accounts for another 20% to 30%.
03:19So if we change this, if we shift our behaviours
03:24and our way of thinking and constructing
03:27to use more sustainable materials, natural materials,
03:33and also thinking about different types of urban settlements,
03:37we can indeed reduce the future hazards
03:42rather than trying to catch up with them.
03:46Dean Odiala, UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction.
03:49Thank you very much for those insights.
03:50and back over to each other.
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