John Dora

John Dora is a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey and is a recognised international expert on climate change adaptation, standards and infrastructure asset management. He has forty years’ experience in infrastructure, including flood risk management and asset management of railway structures. His career has covered research, construction and maintenance of civil engineering infrastructure and he has become an acknowledged expert in resilience. He is somewhat unique in being experienced as a front-line engineering practitioner who works now at policy and strategic levels, using his experience to advise up to government level with many links into current science and research programmes – he is an advisory board member for the Interreg ‘SIRMA’ project on infrastructure resilience. His clients include or have included the Office of Rail and Road, Network Rail, the UN, the UK Met Office, Copernicus Climate Services, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and CEN/CENELEC, the European Standards’ organisations. John frequently leads and participates in events on infrastructure resilience matters, for example in chairing a workshop on surface water infrastructure hazards in June 2021 as part of a DfT/ Innovate UK funded programme; on design standards and resilience for CEN/ CENELEC (Mar. 2021); speaking to the UNESCAP expert group on transport adaptation (Sept. 2020); running a rail climate resilience workshop for the World Bank in Delhi in 2018; and running workshops on rail adaptation for the International Union of Railways (UIC) in April and June 2017.

John was the initiator and technical adviser to the £2.5M joint NR and Rail Safety Standards Board (RSSB) ‘TRaCCA’ programme on climate risks to the GB railway as completed in 2016. In 2012 he co-founded and remains chair of the UK’s Infrastructure Operators’ Adaptation Forum. In August 2020 he became the convenor of the team responsible for ISO’s strategy for international climate change adaptation standards.

In 2020 john was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey. He won a BSI Standards’ Makers’ Award for creativity for his work leading the development of ISO 14090 Adaptation to climate change in 2019 – the first global standard on this topic - and in 2017 the Institution of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Asset Management Prize for the paper Towards the future-proofing of UK infrastructure. As well as his expertise in infrastructure, resilience and adaptation, John is an accomplished lecturer, designing and delivering courses on sustainability, asset management and resilience at the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey.

John founded John Dora Consulting in 2012 and continues to work in the field of infrastructure resilience and engineering as owner of the firm. In 2019 he helped form Climate Sense and is a director of that firm.

Joined 2022

Organisation

Climate Sense