Climate Risk Institute shares more details on undertaking IRP Program

September 24, 2020

On July 7, 2020, Engineers Canada and the Climate Risk Institute (CRI) jointly announced that an agreement had been reached for CRI to assume ownership of the Infrastructure Resilience Professional (IRP) Program. The IRP Program is a series of courses for engineers on the topics of asset management, risk management, the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee (PIEVC) Protocol, and climate change law.

With ownership of the IRP Program having now been transferred to CRI, Engineers Canada reached out to CRI to discuss how the program fits in with their mandate, what they’ve been working on since assuming ownership in July 2020, and their future plans for the program.

Engineers Canada: What is the mandate of CRI and how does the IRP Program fit in with that mandate?

Erik Sparling, Vice President, CRI: Our mandate is to advance practice and deliver services that relate to climate change risk assessment, to adaptation planning, and to policy evaluation and resiliency. At the very core of Climate Risk Institute is capacity-building and working with different types of professionals to improve how they consider climate change in their practices, so as a series of training courses, the IRP Program is a great fit with our mandate.

Al Douglas, President, CRI: One of our core lines of work within CRI is training. We’ve got experience in developing and providing training material to a variety of different audiences related to climate change information, climate science, and more recently, digging in a bit more specifically into the field of professional planning. We thought this would be a nice complement to the efforts that we’ve got underway in CRI to develop and deliver training material. So, we submitted a proposal and came to be the recipient of the IRP Program and the place where the program would be housed and delivered across Canada.