What makes a city work, with Bentley Systems

Modern cities appear to function effortlessly. We switch on the lights, turn on the tap, catch a train, connect to the internet or walk into a hospital without giving much thought to the systems that make it all possible. Beneath that apparent simplicity sits a network of interconnected infrastructure that keeps everyday life moving.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks to Rodrigo Fernandes, global sustainability director at infrastructure engineering software firm Bentley Systems, about why understanding those hidden connections is becoming increasingly important as cities face climate change, ageing infrastructure and growing demands on energy and public services.

From transport networks and energy systems to water, buildings and public infrastructure, cities rely on thousands of interconnected assets that have to work together every day. Yet these systems are often planned, managed and invested in separately, making it difficult to understand how decisions made in one part of the system can have consequences across many others

Their conversation explores how digital twins and better information can help planners, engineers and decision-makers understand interdependencies, explore different scenarios and make better long-term decisions. Along the way, Rodrigo explains why figuring out how infrastructure systems interact is becoming increasingly important for building cities that are more resilient, sustainable and adaptable over time.

In this episode:

• Why cities are systems, not just places
• How infrastructure decisions shape cities for decades
• What digital twins really are — and why they matter
• Why resilience depends on understanding interconnections
• How better information can lead to better decisions

This is a conversation about far more than infrastructure. It's about how cities actually function, why changing them is so difficult, and why understanding the hidden systems around us may be one of the most important foundations for building more resilient communities.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram – and why not spread the word with your friends and colleagues?

Transcript

Felicia Jackson (00:06)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Shaken Not Burned. When we think about cities, we notice them really when something stops working. When trains are delayed or roads are flooded or when construction

overrun drags on for years, when energy systems are struggling under pressure. But most of the time we don't think about it. They feel stable. They function. But that stability depends on an enormous web of infrastructure.

whether that's transport networks, water systems, power grids, buildings, and of course digital systems, all of which have got to be planned, built, and continuously adapted while millions of people continue to live and work around them. And here's the challenge. The decisions that shape how cities function today were often made years, sometimes decades, before we experience their consequences.

Infrastructure takes a long time to build and it lasts a long time. Assumptions about population growth and climate conditions and energy demand and mobility patterns, they all become embedded in physical systems that are difficult and expensive to change once they exist. And I'm sure that most of our listeners will have heard the famous statistic that by around 2050, two thirds of the world's population

that's between 68 and 70 percent is expected to be living in urban environments. And this is all happening when we're really starting to see the impact of climate change, whether that's floods or droughts.

and that impacts the ability of much of our infrastructure to function. So as cities face rising pressures from climate change, electrification, aging assets and growing populations, understanding how infrastructure decisions are made

becomes an essential part of understanding sustainability itself. So my guest today is Rodrigo Fernandes, Global Sustainability Director at Bentley Systems. Bentley works with engineers and planners in cities around the world to model and design infrastructure before it's built, helping decision makers understand how complex urban systems might perform in the real world. We're gonna be exploring how cities are planned long before construction begins.

why infrastructure projects are so difficult to upgrade once they exist, and how modeling and digital tools are changing the way cities think about risk, resilience, and long-term performance. Because sustainability in cities isn't just about new technologies or ambitious targets. It's actually about how the systems we live inside are designed in the first place. So Rodrigo, welcome to the show.

Rodrigo Fernandes (02:28)
Thank you very much Felicia.

Felicia Jackson (02:30)
I referenced the fact that most people only really notice infrastructure when something goes wrong, whether that's congestion or flooding, whether it's construction overruns. From your perspective, why is building or upgrading city infrastructure so hard in practice?

Rodrigo Fernandes (02:44)
Well, you mentioned a lot in your introduction. we know cities are responsible for a big part of climate change, its effect.

because people live in cities and lot of urban environment is there. But as a matter of fact, it's also the cities, the main victims of themselves because cities are highly interdependent, highly complex. They are not isolated assets. All the grids that exist, they all have cascading effects, changing.

components between different industries, transport, energy, water, public life, everything is connected. I remember when I

going to London last year, I took a flight to London, I arrived London and then my phone...

was not working anymore, And then someone at the airport told me that there was a big blackout, a power blackout in Portugal. okay, so what does that mean? What's happening there? So people didn't know what was happening. The blackout was while I was flying to

Lisbon. And once I arrived, my

roaming was not working because the mother company in Portugal was simply without energy at all. So I was in London, I was kind of sick, closed in my hotel, seeing news from the BBC showing how Lisbon

and the rest of the country was affected by a power cutoff without the ability to call my wife, my family and vice versa. And basically what I'm trying to say is that an energy...

problem, a disruption will affect mobility, communications,

transportation, everything. And this happens in the urban environment in cities in a scale. It's crazy, right? So the same water systems were affected as well while we were here. So water supply was not working.

Felicia Jackson (04:26)
you

Rodrigo Fernandes (04:33)
So this is a major aspect of it, the fact that they are complex interdependent systems. It's also what is infrastructure, right? Infrastructure is to support people and it's at cities where infrastructure is more relevant. But the other thing you also mentioned Feliciano, the fact that most infrastructure was built for a different era and retrofitting inside

know, live constrained environments introduces costs, risk and certainty. It's difficult to do, right? the final point I would mention as for this is the fact that decision making in many cases is taken in department silos, coordination might be slow and...

there's also unintended consequences of many of the decisions that are taken. There are lots of stakeholders involved. Decision makers change very frequently in cities because of political cycles, restarting work several times with different technologies or approaches or methodologies. And this is very, very hard to do and to manage all this, right? I think this is, these are...

possibly the key aspects for the difficulty of building or upgrading

seating infrastructure.

Felicia Jackson (05:45)
what really fascinates me about the way you describe it is this idea of the interconnected systems, because one of the things we're trying to get our heads around with climate change is the fact that it's almost that climate change is not itself the problem, it's a risk multiplier for all of the other problems that we face and all of these inter-reliant systems.

we've all become so reliant on technology that we don't really think about it. We expect it to be there. And it's almost as if human operation is on the surface of an incredibly complex, incredibly difficult to manage technological and ecological system.

And we're really beginning to see the cracks show at the edges

this is where I'd like to perhaps get a deeper understanding of why it's so difficult to upgrade and build new city infrastructure.

when we're thinking about the complications and the difficulties involving infrastructure in an urban environment, what makes it so difficult and how can we go about solving those problems?

Rodrigo Fernandes (06:45)
Well, I think one aspect that I think is really important is about public trust and stakeholder engagement. I think that's a critical aspect, first of all. I think being on a department silo or making the decision there and thinking that there will be a...

buying from everyone that's that's the first difficulty

Citizens must be taken into consideration when something is planned. And they need to know the trade-offs, the risks that are involved. Because when we talk about sustainability, we talk about managing trade-offs. There's no way out. Many people think that professionals on sustainability are just looking for ensuring that there are zero pollution, zero emissions, zero consequences of everything. No, it's

managing trade-offs. It's all about that. policymakers and city planners, they have that in mind, for sure. I think that the main difficulty is that usually they don't communicate those trade-offs and what is at stake, what needs to be considered. I do think that digital technologies can do much more and much better

helping them communicating visually, instance, in cities that I know, I'm seeing city planners preparing, planning big infrastructure projects and the way they communicate the new infrastructure, it's not clear at all for people. What is that? Where will be there? What are going to be the consequences

the risks and the benefits. And then people with the uncertainty, will not understand, they will not move forward. creating conditions to better communicate those aspects, I think it's fundamental. I think in many cases it's important that...

decision makers find out if they really need to build something and this is kind of thought-provoking but

before building, analyzing if building is really necessary or if there are other ways of going without that. Of course, all these aspects and to analyze, this is very, very complex and we do advocate that creating better quantification methodologies for making scenario analysis, for really understanding in the planning stage

when you are making the conception hearing, we usually say, creating the conception, deciding...

Felicia Jackson (09:02)
I love that.

Rodrigo Fernandes (09:03)
If you really need something and what you really need, I think it's essential that you consider all these aspects for ensuring you make the right decision. And the scenarios that need to be considered are fundamentally different from the scenarios 20 years ago or 30 years ago. That's also something people have in mind, because the risks are...

Felicia Jackson (09:26)
We live very different lives.

Rodrigo Fernandes (09:27)
Yeah, yes.

Felicia Jackson (09:27)
We have very different expectations.

Rodrigo Fernandes (09:29)
Yeah, so that's also something to have into consideration, right? So it's essential that they have these ideas, this into consideration. Once they have the concept, once they have an idea of what they want to do,

they need to decide how they want to do and they need to do what we call the optioneering, Analyzing the different scenarios and all the early choices they will make will have repercussions in the long term and they know it, more and they should be able to quantify either on the materials that they select, on the procurement, on the products that they select, they can prioritize lowest and

embodied carbon and cost optimization. They can find the balance, find the sweet spot for that. I'm not so concerned about energy sources or about energy optimization to be honest. That's really key, but...

If we think in 20 years, in 50 years, my expectation is that we will become much more efficient in how we generate energy. So that's not the big deal. The big problem, the big elephant in the room, is the materials you use, the materials you put in place, how you put them, and then if you are putting them in a situation

where they will be under strong risks, strong threats from all the considerations you mentioned. Climate risks, of course, population growth that will make an asset immediately outdated. Like imagine if you create a transportation system not taking into consideration population growth, expansion in the

or a situation where that's not efficient, it's really a problem.

Felicia Jackson (11:15)
there's a, think a very good analogy is the Thames barrier that was built in London. it was built at a time when they expected to use it about four times a year. And over the years, the number of times they've had to use the barrier to prevent flooding in London has gone up But because the land in East,

London was protected. There's so much development that's happened there that now the Thames barrier is trying to prevent flooding of some really expensive real estate in London. And yet there's a real question as to how long it's going to be fit for purpose, because no one imagined when they designed it that it was going to need to operate

at a scale and on a level that was never intended for. And I think that issue of what we build and what we build for is really important, especially when you talk about materials, because I've been reading a great deal about the impact of heat, not just on productivity of human beings, but the fact that our electricity infrastructure doesn't work in the same way, that buildings don't operate in the same way, you change the envelope. So one of the questions that I want to get to

is the work that you do is with digital twins and infrastructure modeling. in practical terms, how does modeling change what engineers and what city planners can actually do? What can they avoid getting wrong? And I suppose an additional part to that question is what sort of scenarios are you using when you're modeling for different futures?

Rodrigo Fernandes (12:38)
Technology can indeed be used for that and digital twins, AI models, they are essential for that part. I think, and it's not starting now, right? Now we talk more about digital twins because we bring more real-time data into the conversation but the modeling technology exists for decades, right? So I started my professional career 25 years ago exactly doing numerical modeling.

But let's start thinking about reality mesh modeling, know, photogrammetry, how you can put drones on a city, collect information there, and then create a fidelity model for your infrastructure. So that will help you better understand and visualize existing assets or even future assets that you might put in and mix, right? You can mix the reality with

with design models that you might want to create. that's really interesting because once you have a very high resolution model for your asset or group of assets,

not only you can plan better, which is what we have been talking here, but also you can increase the quality of inspections and maintenance, which is also a key point, like existing infrastructure, which is getting old and old and under threats, because if they are old, it means they are more vulnerable to the risks that are increasing, right? now, if you can better understand the condition

and the monitoring of that, that's really key. We have stories of cities basically monitoring health condition of trees based on digital twins, right? But not only trees, pavements, roads.

many kinds of assets, either natural or built, can be in a city, they can be managed from that stage. Of course, information can also be used only for communication, because if you're something and if you showed something in 3D, visually and all that, that's really key for decision makers, but also for

the citizen there. Then all these scenarios that you can test, once you have a good information that you collected either remotely or in situ satellite data or sensors, it doesn't matter. But once you have all that data and you can run different scenarios, it means that you can study different flood scenarios. Of course, what we say about the 100 flood scenario, maybe it's now

10 year flood scenario, right? But the point is that you might need to run more scenarios and you can run as scenarios as much as you want because it's virtual so you can play God with the data there.

Felicia Jackson (15:29)
So you can test

things under any sort of circumstances that you want.

Rodrigo Fernandes (15:32)
Exactly. So if you build your city.

in your computer before building it in the city itself, it means you can play with floods. You can also play with mobility. Like, okay, what if I put one more lane here for buzz? Or how is this going to impact the traffic based on the information I have already? several cities made this type of analysis, right?

Even in Dubai, they worked on that for creating pedestrian lanes. They studied before making the implementation. Our cities like, for instance, Istanbul, with the metro in Istanbul, the population growth led to new metro stations that they had to build. But the point is they have so many people there. They want to ensure efficiency on how people go in and go out of the trains of the metro stations. They used our software.

for pedestrian simulation to optimize the way they go in and they go out of the train stations. So you can optimize flooding, mobility, also energy and water. So those grids, you can optimize the size of it or making tests like what if we have a massive problem here in this district?

what are the areas or the houses that will be affected by this? all these, so maybe we need to increase the resilience here and make an intervention here to, back up this situation. So they can make all these analysis if they want, either for energy, for workload, for water. basically simulation enables planners for the

design flaws for system conflicts for resilience gaps before they become expensive on-site problems, right? And once you have real-time data...

The most updated data you can, then you can even start making real-time decisions as well, right? Once the digital twin and the model is brought to life, I think they can make real-life decisions, if there's a pipe overflow, you know, some problem or a flood, they can immediately shut down roads

or send alerts to citizens saying that in that area you're not going to get water in the next hours because this happened. We have stories in the US, for instance, with transportation authorities basically leveraging dash cams in cars.

And

basically they make decisions based on that information and using AI. So imagine if snow is detected on an area, immediately they can get an alert and they can start sending cars for collecting and deviating the snow and things like that. So, or any problem with road blockage or something.

this also increases resilience of a city, right? Because it means that in a very fast way, they can do something for avoiding these kinds of problems. So that's why we think that digital twins can shift from this reactive approach to a more predictive resilience. I think that's a key aspect, a fundamental aspect of a city.

Felicia Jackson (18:43)
what strikes me about that is there's a very strong business case, which is obviously improving the way in which things operate so that, people don't have to spend as much on operations and maintenance, that they can manage things in a way that's more effective for the day-to-day running of the city. But it also connects very strongly to what you were talking about earlier, which is identifying trade-offs and the way in which different things play out and the idea that you could actually...

give citizens agency to understand more about the decisions that are being made on their behalf by saying, look, these are the scenarios. Yes, this is going to cost more, but the reason we have to do it is because it will save money or problems or whatever it is in the long run. And I think perhaps there is a lack of communication that is a problem because I think it's not just that people living in the city don't understand what's happening to them.

because they're rarely involved on the level they should be. But that then feeds into politics, which can then make it even harder to get decisions made because if people don't understand what's going on, they tend to not want to do what they're being told to do if it hasn't been explained. And I think there's an important question in here, which is you talk about the importance of city resilience. What do you really mean by resilience in a city and why is it so important?

to planners and asset owners, but most importantly to people.

Rodrigo Fernandes (20:03)
Well, resilience, in my view, it's now becoming a big umbrella, right? So we use more words about, more, more, more.

topics that go into resilience. Being resilient in my vision, I think it's also being more sustainable. It's how you can ensure that the way you manage a situation adapts now and in the future in the fastest way, the smoothest way possible.

This goes way beyond climate change. It involves all the aspects, either they are political, know, security, safety, IT, technology, all these kinds of resiliency are relevant for a city, right? And I think that's really what I define as resilient. I think a city that right now

thinks that he's sustainable or advocates that we are a sustainable city. But if they are not resilient, they are not sustainable. Because the next generations that will come, they will not have the same conditions to live as the ones that were here before. And this for me is a fundamental aspect, right?

Now what is not being resilient, I think that simply put walls, create big walls, hardening infrastructure, for me it's not necessarily being more resilient, not flexible.

Felicia Jackson (21:25)
not flexible and if you're talking about

adaptability you have to have flexibility.

Rodrigo Fernandes (21:30)
Yeah, and in some cases, you know, things can go drastically wrong. know, in Jakarta, for instance, I remember a few years ago there was this big discussion and this vision of building a new capital because Jakarta is basically sinking due to population growth to several water, wells and exploration of water and land subsidence problem. And...

The future for us, it's not abandoning where we are and going to somewhere else to replenish and to re-establish again. That's not being resilient at all. That's simply abandoning, throwing the towel and not being able to improve. I think to become resilient it means also to try to do the best we can with what we have and if that's not possible then let's try to

to bring the creative solutions for us. So, and the best we have is nature first place, and then we can work with the infrastructure we already have. So, after nature, after built environment, then we can start thinking about bringing more firepower to that. But, I think that those are the key instruments for resiliency. Technology is just a tool. It's a tool that you use so that you can make that in practice.

I don't see technology as the key aspect for making a city more resilient. It's a key aspect, but not the fundamental one. It's just the tool that will help the hero achieving the final goal.

Felicia Jackson (23:01)
And I think there's an element there of we've got so used to relying on technology to solve our problems that people tend to get focused on what is the technological solution to the problem rather than what is the problem and do we have a tool or a process that is going to help us address that. And that connects really strongly to one of the questions I wanted to ask you, we've touched on the fact that a lot of today's infrastructure was

built expecting different populations and different environmental conditions. And we've talked about the fact that infrastructure is here. We have to work to a great extent with what we've got. So I'm interested in trying to understand what are the challenges that arise when cities are actually trying to adapt those existing systems? What do we need to look at if we're going to adapt existing?

infrastructure instead of just moving on or building something new.

Rodrigo Fernandes (23:54)
I was just giving the example of Jakarta and Nusantara. But yeah, think legacy infrastructure often has limited capacity, it also outdated standards. And when I mentioned standards, standards for quality of life, but also technological standards in some cases. Imagine you run a project several years ago.

and then the data you collected was based on a locked environment and then you want to do something with that 20 years or 30 years later and then you find out that that company doesn't exist anymore the data was locked in on that specific company so it's gone right so you need

Felicia Jackson (24:34)
You do hear terrible stories about people trying to build new buildings or building a new area and they're digging down. In London, sometimes it's finding an old graveyard that nobody existed, but it can be pipes and wells and old transport networks that you just didn't know were there.

Rodrigo Fernandes (24:50)
Yeah, and in many cases you might know they are there, but you simply need to do everything again to make the inventory and to collect all the data to digitalize so that you can start from somewhere because if you're in a locked environment of the data, when I mentioned standards, I also mentioned open standards for data exchange and for ensuring that,

If you're managing an asset that might be here like 100 years, you need to make sure you own the data in a way that the data will not be logged in in something. That's essential in my view.

Felicia Jackson (25:23)
Because that's

really scary. I've been around long enough to remember when things were on paper and then they were on floppy disks and there was something weird called a daisy something that was a type of disk. None of that would be readable by any modern system.

Rodrigo Fernandes (25:40)
No, in some cases you can use AI to interpret some of them, but it's not efficient in many cases. think the problem that we will have in the future, that we are seeing already, is the cities that might not have the data in papers or in those kinds of systems, but in systems that are locked in and they cannot move to something else. That's one aspect.

The other aspect is also, so incompatible data standards,

Felicia Jackson (26:05)
So interoperability is what we're really talking about across

networks, across assets and across time.

Rodrigo Fernandes (26:12)
Everything,

corridors, aging pipes, utilities that are dense more and more. So those challenges, we usually talk about when we talk about infrastructure, we also talk a lot about linear infrastructure. But the linear infrastructure is nothing else than grids that are connecting people and goods and data in many cases, either communications or telecoms.

Felicia Jackson (26:27)
Okay.

Rodrigo Fernandes (26:36)
but water, energy, transportation is also agreed. And all that is very difficult to manage because there are physical constraints, aging aspects there. And now, beyond the asset itself, it's the environment, right? It's the climate pressures that exposed the vulnerabilities in those assets, in the systems that were never designed for heat waves.

for extreme rainfall that can then generate landslides like here in Portugal that a major storm here destroyed a bridge in the most important highway in Portugal and so disrupted there. But that's just one point. It also destroyed trees.

thousands of trees and the roofs of many houses and all that. And the energy, of course. 500,000 people that were without electricity for days, for several days. So they were not designed for the climate pressures that exist today. So I think this is one aspect. So what can be done, right? What can be done to solve that? I believe that...

technology will play an important role but they need to start trying to find out how they can for instance if you build a house with something on the roof that is highly exposed to to strong wind maybe you need to you know

Felicia Jackson (27:59)
Maybe you need to redesign

your house.

Rodrigo Fernandes (28:01)
You redesign the house in a way that you cannot put the same roof there again, right? Or the energy, the electric utility, the distribution of energy, the energy delivery, transmission and distribution is, you know, with the tower lines, maybe they need to go underground instead of being exposed to wind conditions. If they are under the ground, of course there are other risks, then you need to analyze that, but...

Does it make sense to rebuild the whole electric distribution system in the air when they know that if something comes up again, it's going to destroy it again? So they really need to fundamentally redesigning it and, okay, let's take into account what are the trade-offs, how much it will cost. If they put all the numbers there, that's where technology can help.

quantifying and managing these trade-offs or not managing but creating visibility for the decision makers so they can decide.

Felicia Jackson (28:57)
a question leapt to mind because of a conversation I had last week, about flooding insurance. And the chap I was talking to said that you'd come across instances where insurance companies were insisting that the ruined house was built back in exactly the same way, because that was the structure of the agreement with the insurance company. So I'm really interested in what the barriers are.

So for example, let's imagine that we've got the good data. We've got data that has been put together in a visible and interoperable way. And that's being fed into technology that enables us to model what might happen in the future. Now you would think that would lead directly to better decisions, but in reality, there are things like the insurance problem. So

what still makes it difficult to make good infrastructure decision? What makes it hard?

Rodrigo Fernandes (29:47)
So I think that will bring us to the beginning of the interview. I think stakeholder engagement is essential. The ability to communicate where we are and where we will be is an essential part of the decision-making process. This leads to more public trust and more transparency and it will facilitate the decision because we know that urban leaders, city leaders...

They have this difficulty. They need to balance policy, budgets, public expectations, governance. just engineering logic, that's okay, that's essential, but the leaders, have much more than that, right? So even

if the data is connected,

Are you using the data? So we know 80 to 90 percent of the data you collected is what we call dark data because it's not used

if you collect data, let's use the data to make decisions, to help you make better decisions, right? I think that's an essential part.

Felicia Jackson (30:48)
There's a really interesting

point there though, which is related to a lot of sustainability reporting data, because companies are constantly pulling together lots of different data. But it's very difficult to see where the data they're pulling in that tells you where they are historically is being used to change how they're going to move forward in the future. And I think there's a mind shift required there that seems to be the case in many, different disciplines and domains.

Rodrigo Fernandes (31:16)
Yeah, yes, I think in the mindset change and the new cultural aspect is also needed, right? We talked about stakeholder engagement, talked about this data that is needed, data-driven approaches, data-centric approaches, trade-offs, all that. But I think there's still a big gap in terms of educational systems, a traditional way people learn

civil engineering or structural engineering. It's amazing how they still, they learn what's needed to, you know, to technically know the maths and I'm an environmental engineer as well, but in the future I would say that we would like that we would not be needed either chief sustainability officers or environmental engineers. We should not exist.

our knowledge should be part of every civil engineer or every structural engineer and that information should be in their courses, their universities, all that. And I think, the people that make decisions, the people that are the city leaders, if they don't understand the risks that they are facing, if they don't really understand also the approaches that they can follow,

the circularity concepts, LCA, the life cycle assessment, all these instruments that are critical for managing infrastructure, I think that's not going to change, right? So it doesn't matter if you have good data or lots of data or great tools, simply you won't use them.

Felicia Jackson (32:43)
I think that's a challenge in a lot of different areas. There is, though a great deal of interest in the last few years about how cities can improve their infrastructure and trying to find ways of encouraging it. So there's a pull for that kind of integrated knowledge, which perhaps might have an impact on the way in which people are taught. Although actually, when I think about it, changing educational systems does seem to be one of the slowest things in the world. I think perhaps what

might help bring it out is identifying those cross-domain problems so that we start to be forced to think about things in a slightly more systemic way. I'm just thinking, are there areas where cities are feeling pressures that residents might not be aware of that actually connect to infrastructure, connect to heat and energy demand?

in a way that we can make it a reality for people because I think before anybody changes anything they do, they have to feel that they live in that decision. Does that make sense?

Rodrigo Fernandes (33:45)
I think so, yeah. As far as I understand, what your meaning is, you know, there are new risks, new pressures.

Felicia Jackson (33:53)
I'm just trying to understand if there are ways in which we can talk about what's happening that highlight the problems that we're facing in ways that residents don't yet think about so that we can, it's almost translating the knowledge of the expert into a lived reality for the person experiencing the impact.

Rodrigo Fernandes (34:11)
Of course,

there is. And I think that's why I'm not so concerned about many of the geopolitical shifts that happen around the world. Because the impacts are there. You just see it. It's there. We don't need to explain it, right? Increased rainfall, we see it overwhelming drainage systems in a way that never before.

if you're in a coastal area you simply have problems in summer because beaches will need to be closed because of a summer Rainfall or something like that or you get people going to hospital because the pollution but then even things like transportation that in in many cases

the disruptions that you have in transportation when you have a flood. So, okay, you want to go to a place, then it's closed. A bridge is gone. Now you need to spend one hour instead of ten minutes going to the next area. It's affecting your life. Your day-to-day job is affected. How come is that happening? Well, it happened because basically the bridge was old, not prepared for this big...

this big flood, this big river flow that happened. But then it might happen simply in other parts of the world, water scarcity. You have simply not enough water in many cases for people to live in. If you don't have water, you start seeing governments and city leaders saying, now you cannot have water in your tap for this amount of time.

or they stop supplying water for specific activities. And this tremendously affects people. think these are just examples that are manifested in many cases. The examples I gave to you with telecommunications simply affected because of a power outage that resulted from a situation where

they were not prepared to something like that. And the problem is that they need a backup plan so they can become more resilient. And I think this is creating more exposure and people are becoming more and more aware. And I trust, I believe, that independently of how you see climate change,

in terms of the mitigation i think the adaptation aspect is now gaining much more traction because people are feeling it people feel i i think possibly five years ago ten years ago when we talked about climate change most of the interest was about mitigation decarbonization and people were seeing that investing in resilience and adaptation was simply putting money

Felicia Jackson (36:36)
Well, they couldn't work out how to make any money out of it.

Rodrigo Fernandes (36:38)
Yeah, yeah. Right now it's the opposite, right? Because it's there, it's happening, it's on day-to-day job, it's a routine, it's the new normal, and now they need to understand that something needs to be done. Yeah.

Felicia Jackson (36:53)
I think that's an absolutely wonderful point to end our conversation on but before we go I would like to ask my favorite question which is what haven't I asked you about that I should have done?

Rodrigo Fernandes (37:04)
Okay, that's...

Felicia Jackson (37:05)
I know it's a difficult one, but I think that, it's always worth just having a random kind of, is there something you want to talk about that you think is really important that we haven't touched on?

Rodrigo Fernandes (37:14)
Right, no, I think there's an aspect which is the one I was just mentioning at the end, which is the aspect of the mitigation versus adaptation, right? Should we prioritize one or the other or should we abandon mitigation because of political shifts when we go into adaptation? So my view, is that

If you want to become more resilient, there's no way that you can become resilient without reducing carbon footprint. The long-term resilience depends only on carbon. I think we professionals in this area need to...

take advantage of what's happening in the world, which is really bad, unfortunately, but we need to take advantage to create a narrative where we explain that decarbonization is indeed part of the resilience pathway. And so we need to provide this holistic approach explaining that decarbonization works together with

with resilience. So it's not one or the other. It's basically one is a partner of the other. I think that's what I would like to emphasize.

Felicia Jackson (38:29)
And I love the fact that you do because what I was going to say is that not only does it seem like a foolish thing to look at binary solutions to problems that are about interconnected systems, but actually if you look at

many of the resilience or adaptation projects that have been done, they have huge mitigation benefits. These things literally do not exist in isolation. You're absolutely right that we can't have adaptation without mitigation because we need to mitigate to minimise the extent of what we have to adapt to. But we can do both at the same time. And so I couldn't agree with you more on the narrative and I absolutely love it. Thank you.

Rodrigo Fernandes (38:50)
Exactly.

Yeah, it's,

Yeah,

I think that and once we have that mindset, I think then we can start leveraging the tools that we have there to manage these trade-offs and where we can bring carbon cost risk all together, analyze, make the right decisions, move from reactive to a proactive approach and also take advantage of technologies for a better communication, for reaching out to people and let them know.

below us and above us so they make the right decisions. think that's how I think we will be able to change the world.

Felicia Jackson (39:45)
do like to end on a note of positive optimism about how we do go about changing the world, because this is the only one we've got and we've got to make it work with what we have. So Rodrigo, thank you so much for joining us today. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I think if I've got one takeaway, it's not just that cities don't change quickly. It's that we're not really addressing the problem in quite the right way yet. We have the tools, we have the knowledge.

We just have to change the way we think about what we're trying to do and that whatever else happens, the politics isn't really the point because the physics doesn't change and we have to live in the environment we exist in. And I think what this conversation has also highlighted for me is this idea that sustainability, that begins long before construction starts. It's actually about choices. It's about decision planning.

It's about engineers and planners making choices under uncertainty, Balancing cost and risk and performance and future needs that we don't yet know what they're going to be. They're needs that can't be fully predicted. And

For residents of cities, much of this actually remains invisible. The comfort of our buildings, the reliability of transport and the resilience of our cities, they all depend on these hidden decisions being made well. And that needs to be clearer to everyone if we're going to adapt successfully to future environments. So in the next episode of the Cities and Built Infrastructure Arc, we're actually going to be moving from planning to operation.

actually looking at what it takes to keep buildings and urban systems functioning in the day to day and why managing infrastructure may be one of the biggest challenges we all now face. So if you've enjoyed the conversation today, don't forget to like and follow and until next time, this is Shaken Not Burned.