January 14, 2008 -- The Public Entity Risk Institute's (PERI) is hosting an online symposium entitled Infrastructure Risk and Renewal: The Clash of Blue and Green, this week, January 14-18, 2008.

Rising demand for sweeping infrastructure renewal—even reinvention—is being driven by the risk management agendas coming from two largely independent but increasingly competing policy movements:

• the “sustainability” movement, aiming at environmental protection and resource efficiency and particularly concerned with “green” designs for buildings and other infrastructure; and
  
  
• the homeland/national security movement, responding to the threats of attack or disaster and particularly concerned with infrastructure security—which we identify with the color “blue” (a common symbol of reliability, security, trust, etc.).

Each day this week, specially commissioned Issues and Ideas Papers will be posted on the PERI website. They will also e-mail links to the papers each day – at no cost – to anyone who enrolls in the program ahead of time. The papers are written by recognized experts and are meant to stimulate thinking about risk management and provide some practical solutions to the questions raised. After you have read the materials, you are invited to make comments in the symposium's on-line threaded discussion.

Among the introductory papers posted today is a paper on blue-green conflicts at the local level entitled Blue versus Green: Conflict and Resolution by Eric Holdeman, Principal, Emergency Management and Homeland Security, and Melinda Harris, Senior Economist, ICF International.