Integrated Urban Disaster Risk Reduction – October 2011

Anup has 10 years of experience in development and implementation of risk management projects, programmes related to early warning systems, risk communication, project formulation, and construction technology. He is currently providing technical and managerial support to Disaster Management and Climate change related projects at TARU DRiVE.

Prior to TARU, he was involved in providing technical and coordination support to the development of end-to-end early warning system for the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems (RIMES) and as Programme Coordinator for – Programme for Hydro-Meteorological Hazard Mitigation in Secondary Cities in Asia (PROMISE) at ADPC Bangkok. He was associated in the capacity of National Project Coordinator with UNDP India towards the implementation of the National Urban Earthquake Vulnerability Reduction Project – an initiative taken across 38 cities falling in seismic zone III, IV and V. Anup also served as a member of the Technical Advisory Group set by the National Disaster Management Division (Govt. of India) and UNDP India. He has also undertaken damage assessment studies as part of the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM).

His interests are disaster management policy and institutional analysis, development of early warning systems, risk assessment, public safety, housing & land use planning, business continuity management, community based disaster risk reduction, safer construction techniques, disaster risk reduction and emergency planning.

Dr. Revi is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the Law and Management schools of the University of Delhi. He is one of South Asia’s leading disaster mitigation and management experts and has led emergency teams to assess, plan and execute recovery and rehabilitation programmes for ten major earthquake, cyclone, surge and flood events affecting over five million people. The experience of these extreme events has provided him deep insight into the behaviour of hyper-stressed social, economic and environmental systems. It has also provided Aromar a strong incentive to examine ‘sustainability’ in both its empirical and theoretical dimensions. He is currently leading the development of India’s first state-level comprehensive multi-hazard vulnerability analysis for the World Bank. This is expected to develop estimates of economic vulnerability and loss due to natural and man-made hazards and climate-change related processes, and underpin the development of appropriate fiduciary risk mitigation instruments. Besides this, he works on economic, environmental, and social change at the global and regional scale. In India Aromar is involved in the improvement of the neglected public-private-community interface in the areas of development, human settlements, water, energy, health, and ICT. He specialises in development planning, urban development, political economy of institutional change, and implementation of multi-sectoral public policy initiatives.

B.R. Balachandran is an architect and planner with nearly two decades of professional and academic experience in architecture and urban planning. He established Alchemy Urban Systems Private Limited with other like minded professionals in 2007. Before that he spent nearly a decade with Environmental Planning Collaborative (EPC), Ahmedabad, doing pioneering work in urban planning. Mr. Balachandran is well known in professional planning circles for his contribution (as Executive Director, EPC) to planning the reconstruction of the city of Bhuj in Kutch District of Gujarat after the earthquake of 2001. Mr. Balachandran was the land use and physical planning expert in an international team commissioned by the World Bank to prepare a Post Disaster Housing Reconstruction Handbook. He has also worked on international projects in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Mauritius and Indonesia.

Dr. Mahesh is a senior consultant at TARU leading edge. He has a bachelors degree in civil engineering (CEPT, India) followed by masters in Geoinformatics (ITC, The Netherlands) and PhD in environmental modeling (ISU, USA). He has been actively involved in the field of hazard risk and disaster modeling spanning three continents. His research and consultancy experience ranges from mathematical models to sectoral analysis to developing climate resilient strategies.

Some of his cutting edge works include modeling forest fires, non-parametric modeling of urban heat island effects, climate variability and change analysis for the state of Gujarat, hazard risk and vulnerability analysis for the delta regions of Myanmar and climate resilient strategies for Surat and Indore, India.

Rohit Jigyasu is a conservation architect and risk management consultant from India, currently working as Professor at the Research Center for Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan and is the President of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness(ICORP). He is also Principal Researcher from India for the joint Research Project ‘Understanding habitats, housing and social changes in post-disaster traditional and relocated rural settlements in India’ being undertaken through collaboration between Chitakara University, Chandigarh and University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland. Rohit has been teaching as the visiting faculty at several national and international academic institutions in India and abroad. He has been working for UNESCO and other international organisations such as the World Seismic Safety Initiative (WSSI) for undertaking post earthquake assessments in Gujarat, Kashmir, Indonesia and Bhutan. He brings with him the practical experience of working on risk management plans in the World Heritage sites of Khajuraho Hampi, Konarak and Ajanta & Ellora in India.

Prof. Vinod Chandra Menon is an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was formerly the Chief of Emergency in the UNICEF in India and served as a member of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Government of India from 2005 to 2010. During his tenure as member of NDMA, Prof. Menon has been instrumental in developing guidelines and policy for disaster risk management in the country.