WSP USA Author Discusses Practical and Relatable Climate Strategies in New Future Ready Book

WSP USA helps organizations and communities become Future Ready® by guiding policy and action for greater climate resilience and sustainability, and a newly released book sharply highlights the opportunities and strategies associated with addressing and adapting to the climate crisis.

Co-authored by Alastair MacGregor, national director of Property and Buildings at WSP, this book combines climate resilience strategy and technology with the sweeping impacts that climate change is having on organizations, communities and individuals.

“You can ask yourself as an individual — whether you’re the head of a household, the CEO of a company, the mayor of a town or the president of a country — ‘How are we going to be ready for the future?’” MacGregor said. “We don’t know what that future looks like specifically, but we do know that it’s going to be very different than today, and that means we have to embrace an approach that’s both flexible and agile.”

Titled “Future Ready: Your Organization’s Guide to Rethinking Climate, Resilience and Sustainability,” the book serves as a guide for business, government and other infrastructure organization leaders to set and implement sustainability and resilience strategies in complex project and operating environments, in addition to other environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

Published by Wiley, MacGregor co-authored the book with Tom Lewis, a climate, resilience and sustainability consultant. The pair structured the book’s first part as a tour of a dynamic and changing world, with the second half being a practical roadmap for organizations.

MacGregor explained that presenting the impactful stories of extreme weather events in the book’s first half helps make the complex concepts within climate, resilience and sustainability more relatable to readers.

“By putting it together with real stories in the first half of the book, it becomes less theoretical, because the challenge with all of these topics is to show that it does actually impact each of us.” MacGregor said. “I think there will be at least one story within the first half of the book that everyone will find relatable.”

The book shares practical examples and case studies that draw on hundreds of completed WSP projects across a full range of client organizations, markets, sectors and scales. According to MacGregor, these all exemplify WSP’s proven Future Ready® process and prepare practical strategies for readers to reduce risk, maximize resources and drive return on their investments.

More specifically, the book explores ways that leaders and project managers can effectively confront four megatrends:

• our changing climate,
• shifting societal trends and a growing focus on equity,
• increasing pressure on natural resources and ecosystems, and
• rapid developments in technology.

“When we started having these conversations internally, what became very apparent is that the whole conversation around climate resilience and sustainability was getting very siloed,” MacGregor said. “In that sense, we could be driving the situation from different angles and with different client types, but perhaps everybody is facing the same challenges.

“You could write a book about each of the four megatrends,” he continued. “But the goal with this book is to provide readers a better understanding and give them a better lens around climate, society, technology and resources as a whole, and the interrelationships between them. To do that, we tied all of these different challenges and concepts together.”

With WSP being a leader in this field, MacGregor said that the firm has a responsibility to drive the conversation around climate, resilience and sustainability forward, and his hope is that this book helps spread that conversation to an even wider audience.

“I believe we have an obligation of leadership in our business, and if we're going to drive societal changes for a more resilient future, then we need to be there to help guide that effort,” he said. “I hope that this book will help people and organizations start to think about how these climate change trends will impacts their lives and operations, and to start thinking about their futures.”

The book’s foreword was written by Spiro N. Pollalis, Harvard Design School professor and director of the Zofnass Program for the Sustainability of Infrastructure; and Anthony Kane, president and CEO of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. There’s also the forward-looking afterword written by Stacy Swann, WSP executive vice president for climate finance, ESG and sustainable investment.

“Future Ready: Your Organization’s Guide to Rethinking Climate, Resilience and Sustainability” is now available for purchase at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and other online retailers.

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