FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
INDIANAPOLIS — Kevin Mickey, director of professional development and geospatial technologies education for The Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is participating today in the White House Forum on Smart Finance for Disaster Resilience.
He is attending on behalf of the National Institute of Building Sciences, for which he is the 2016 chair of the Multihazard Mitigation Council. In May, Mickey testified to a congressional subcommittee that is exploring how to lower the rising costs of federal responses to disasters.
The event, organized by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the National Security Council, will address innovative finance options to support pre-disaster mitigation and community resilience. The program will consider new investment approaches, review incentive programs that are deployed in communities currently, and explore partnerships and opportunities to leverage additional future resources.
The Polis Center, part of the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, is one of the nation’s leading university-based units working with communities to enhance their preparedness for natural disasters. It specializes in providing place-based research tools to transform data into usable information for more effective local decision-making.
The Multihazard Mitigation Council, one of 18 councils of the National Institute of Building Sciences, works to reduce the total losses associated with natural and other hazards by fostering and promoting implementation of consistent and improved multihazard risk mitigation strategies, guidelines, practices and related efforts.