Time Will Tell - Sam Kernaghan Knows What's Coming

Sam Kernaghan is someone I've had the very good fortune of spending quite a bit of time with over the last couple of years and I'm grateful for that. Sam is the Resilience Director for the Committee for Sydney - an urban policy think tank that has the rare opportunity of being able to work above the challenges and messy interactions of problems, risks and opportunities the city faces. Sam does this after more than 20 years working in similar fields - from his time in Sri Lanka helping with post tsunami reconstruction, to working on and leading a lot of the early Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities work across the Asia Pacific in countries like Indonesia, India, Japan and New Zealand, before returning to lead this important work back in his home city.

Resilience has been and can be a jargon heavy term - it's had it's time in the sun too just like regeneration seems to be everywhere at the moment. Most simply though I appreciate the simple premise of the word and it's value to what many of us in sustainability and social impact think about - how to withstand pressures and how to adapt and evolve into something stable, healthy and able to be counted on. I think one thing that can be difficult about the term is its wide applicability - everything from individual mental health to the ability of complex urban systems to handle and respond to any number of shocks and stress events. Sam is just the person to be speaking about this though as he has seen more than most as this field of urban resilience has developed and evolved since the mid 2000s as more thinking and effort has gone into better understanding the interplay between how increasing urbanisation, a changing climate and more development highlights or exacerbates existing inequalities and problems in a specific place.

In this chat we cover a tonne - his role at Committee for Sydney and some great work he and his team have been doing on flood and heat perils and risks, the profundity of his time in Sri Lanka in his 20s then the fascinating and important work he's been doing since. There are a lots of valuable insights in this one, I know you'll come away more knowledgable having listened.

I of course loved being able to spend this time with Sam, and his wisdom on the dynamics of power, the virtue of patience and the necessity of preparation all really struck me. I hope you enjoy it.

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