Disaster Management and Climate Change

India is among the most vulnerable locations on the planet and it is in this challenging setting that our cutting edge work on disaster risk assessment, mitigation planning and reconstruction protects and resurrects lives, property, critical infrastructure and business.

Responding to every major disaster event in India in the last two decades, we have made serious contributions to how disaster damage is estimated in, and responded to, in the country. Highly sophisticated tools and models are being deployed in our internationally acclaimed risk assessment and mitigation planning work and insight from our wide disaster-related work informs our growing Climate Change portfolio.

Through the 1990s, we undertook the official post-disaster damage assessment and reconstruction planning for the Government of India (GoI). This followed earthquakes in Uttarkashi (1991), Marathwada (1993), Jabalpur (1997), Chamoli (1999) and Kutch (2001), cyclones in Andhra Pradesh (1999), Gujarat (1998) and Orissa (1999) and floods in Haryana and Punjab (1995).

Beginning with our first work in Uttarkashi, where our reconstruction of Aungi village was hailed as a model of technically-sound and culturally-viable post-earthquake intervention, we have pioneered approaches and tools- among them, an India-specific cyclone damage gradation schema, the landmark Palamu Drought Proofing Action Plan and a Visual Damage Identification Guide (VDIG)- that have altered how damage assessment and mitigation and reconstruction planning occurs in the country.

Our recent work in Gujarat threads insights from past work and is widely cited as a model for other Indian States. The Hazard Risk and Vulnerability Assessment and Composite Risk Atlas for Gujarat is the first Level 1 composite risk assessment and mitigation plan at sub-regional scale outside the United States of America (USA) and our multi-hazard risk assessment in Hazira, an industrial concentration in Gujarat with investment of over USD 12 billion, is the first comprehensive risk assessment of a large industrial concentration in India.

Our first work on Climate Change was the India/ World4 model, a dynamic global computer model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, we have gone on to prepare the Background Paper for the Global Urban Summit on Climate Change Risk Adaptation and Mitigation in Indian Cities and are now the India Country Partner to the recently initiated, Rockefeller Foundation-supported Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN). Our work for the ACCCRN will develop tools, techniques and strategies that will enable urban India to prepare, withstand and recover better from Climate Change impacts.