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Live Chat with TED Speaker Vicki Arroyo: Preparing for our changing climate

TED Speaker and executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, Vicki Arroyo, will be joining us for a special one-hour live Q&A session with the TED community!

Since much of her research didn't make it into the final video, she'll be fielding questions on the science behind her inspiring talk, as well as further discussion about what we can do to prepare our homes and cities for the new climate.

Date: Friday, October 5th
Time: 12pm-1pm Eastern time

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Closing Statement from TED Live Chats

From Vicki Arroyo:

Again, I would like to thank Aja and the TED staff for this opportunity and those who wrote in.
For more information and to see some of the tool kits I mentioned, please visit our adaptation clearinghouse at www.adaptationclearinghouse.org. I hope this conversation helps you elevate this discussion of preparedness in your own communities – wherever you call “home.”

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  • Desiree Ericson

    • +1
    Oct 5 2012: Hi Vicki,

    Are coastal cities doing anything to provide efficient public transportation in evacuations? I have friends who barely made it out of New Orleans before Katrina, because the city ran out of gas for cars. Would it be possible to create a simple public transportation-based solution for people to use as soon as they decide they want to leave?
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      Vicki Arroyo 50+

      • 0
      TED Speaker
      Oct 5 2012: Hi Desiree - I am sorry to hear about your friends' problems! There were so many missteps and missed opportunities to help people in advance of the storm. Douglas Brinkley's fabulous book about Katrina -- The Great Deluge -- notes that empty Amtrak trains were offered to the City to evacuate prior to the storm.
      Many of the cities buses were left in low-lying areas and flooded with the rest of the city. About 250,000 vehicles were found floating in the floodwaters: like the car that floated into my mom's Gentilly home in that photo I showed at TED. We absolutely have to be smarter about how to inform people where they can get rides out of town. I think this lesson was learned given the deplorable conditions and loss of life at the Superdome and Convention Center - the idea of sheltering people in the city when a mandatory evacuation is called is crazy and it cannot happen again and so they have to have other options -- and time! -- to evacuate in advance.

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