David A. Dodd

President & CEO at International Sustainable Resilience Center, Inc

David A. Dodd, CEcD/FM/HLM is the founding President and CEO of the International Sustainable Resilience Center, Inc (ISRC) a Center of Excellence focused on climate, disaster resilience and sustainability based in New Orleans, Louisiana, US. His journey to climate adaptation began with recovery from Hurricane Katrina, where he was a liaison between the state’s economic development agency and federal recovery efforts.
From there, David led efforts in Mexico and Japan after major earthquakes and consulted with Australia and the Philippines on coastal and city flooding, all on actions to enable robust economic recovery and adaptation. David was very involved in recovery from the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the coastal restoration and protection master plan as a result of a large settlement from the spill.
In 2013, David was successful with consulting partner Novaces, LLC in winning a 5-year contract with the US Economic Development Administration to deploy for recovery and resilience in major disasters. The contract was renewed in 2017, and he worked with the Puerto Rico Economic Recovery team, under EDA as lead of the Economic Recovery Support Function, until May of 2023. His work in Puerto Rico included significant efforts to restore and protect Puerto Rico’s coastline, raising awareness of this critical issue, which led their Governor to declare an island-wide emergency. Altogether, David worked recovery from 15 major disasters.
Most recently, David has used his 30+ years in development finance to develop new methods of financing climate adaptation. He is a member of the National New Markets Fund Advisory Board, one of the largest and most active funds utilizing the New Markets Tax Credit Program, which is designed to spur investment in low-income areas throughout the United States. Prior to that, he founded two Business and Industrial Development Corporations, which are non-depository financial institutions that can provide innovative financial solutions for small and medium sized companies. As a critical component of this effort, he is working with StateBook, a provider of comprehensive climate financial risk, which he utilizes to model potential reduction in negative financial impacts of climate-induced hazards.
David is currently involved in two critical leadership roles: 1) Leading development of guidelines for integrating resilience into infrastructure projects, both new and existing, for the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s International Public Private Partnership Centre of Excellence; and 2) Providing an analysis on lack of utilization from multilateral climate funding sources for the World Association of Public Private Partnership Units and Professionals, of which he is a founding member.
David is also a technology entrepreneur, having developed a set of tools for climate resilience, including the Economic Resilience ScorecardTM that utilizes a self-assessment to provide automatically generated guidance; and the Disaster Impact ToolkitTM that utilizes a complex algorithm to compare damages with and without investment in resilience. He has been involved in tech development for almost 30 years, both in developing and financing new technologies.
David is a graduate of Louisiana Tech university and the Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University. He is a Certified Economic Developer, Fellow Member, and Honorary Life Member of the International Economic Development Council. David is the former Dean of the University of Oklahoma Economic Development Institute, the recognized graduate-level education source for that profession. He was also the Founding Chairman of The Resilience Development Institute at the same university. He currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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