TC 307 - ISSMGE Sustainability Committee - Status Report 1

Dear TC307 members,

Greetings! Hope you all are doing well in these tough circumstances. Wanted to briefly touch base with you on some happenings and updates including one on 20 ISSMGE Sydney Conference. I am compiling them under status reports. This is the first one. Let me introduce Olivier Cuisinier and Mizanur Rahman for helping me with our committee activities. 

  1. Prof Mark Jaksa has allocated two sessions for TC307 as we have a healthy 70 plus papers related to TC307 and they will be reviewed by each country. We will know more about what papers will be accepted and allocated to TC307 sometime around May. I will need to discuss with you all and see how we will cover these sessions....one session is perhaps for invited talks and another one for papers of our session. Difficult to know who all will attend the conference at this time so it will take some time before we finalize all these related to the Sydney conference. 
  2. We will have a Virtual University talk on TC307 topic sometime in Spring and Dipanjan agreed to give this talk. 
  3. I am working with Mizanur on the website (ISSMGE website is ok and our Geoworld website is down) and it is taking a little longer than I was expecting. That is ok and we will get it fixed sometime within the next month.
  4. Ian Jefferson (UK) mentioned some interesting challenging things happening during COVID. We all could share this information among us. One thing I would like to do is add more friends to the TC307 and please send me and Mizanur emails of those who may have interests in our committee works. I will include them as friends of our TC307.
  5. Many of you represent various countries and feel free to email me and the rest of the members on what interesting things are happening in your country related to sustainability works in the Geo field. I was thinking of doing TC307 webinars and not sure we want to do more webinars at this time as we have so much fatigue of virtual talks.....I am open to new ideas....pls stay tuned! 
  6. The 1ICSGE Conference in Portugal was postponed due to the current pandemic environment. I am hoping Drs. Laura Caldeira and Nuno Cristelo (and Dr Sara Rios) of Portugal could update us on their future plans. This is an important conference and TC307 will be supportive if they plan to do it in the near future.

Thanks all and pls share your thoughts/happenings in your member countries and ideas either within this group or by emailing it directly to me.

 

Best Regards and Safe Holidays!

Anand Puppala

Chair, TC 307 Sustainability in Geotechnical Engineering