Racism, Exclusion & Risk

February 17, 2021 5:09 pm Published by Leave a comment

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The widespread prevalence of racism in our society and institutions shapes disaster risks. Mechanisms of differentiation based on race are determinants in the social construction of vulnerability and exposure, perpetuating systemic patterns of exclusion and privilege. By overlooking reality, people and organizations often fail to notice racism, or anticipate the risks this can engender and entrench. We can do something about it…  But how to initiate constructive conversations on the difficult intersection of race and risk?

Hop into this interactive session with literaryperformer Regie Gibson and risk-takers Janot Mendler de Suarez and Pablo Suarez. We’ll ignite some sparks with a selection of cartoons created during earlier UR2020 sessions. Finally, building on “meaning-making” lines co-created by UR2020 participants, Regie will deliver a Spoken Word performance on anti-racism, inclusion and resilience.

This plenary has been organized by Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and World Bank’s Social Sustainability and Inclusion Global Practice. It builds off a World Bank Anti-Racism workshop developed by World Bank’s Social Sustainability and Inclusion Global Practice.

Pablo Suarez
Associate Director for Research and Innovation,

Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Pablo Suarez is associate director for research and innovation at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, as well as visiting fellow at Boston University, and artist in residence at the National University of Singapore Lloyd Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (NUS IPUR). He has consulted for the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, Oxfam, and about twenty other international humanitarian and development organizations, working in more than 60 countries. His current work involves creative approaches to climate risk management – ranging from self-learning algorithms for flood prediction, to collaboration with humorists to inspire thinking and action. Pablo holds a water engineering degree, a master’s degree in planning, and a Ph.D. in geography.

Janot Mendler de Suarez
Technical Advisor, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Janot Mendler de Suarez consults with the World Bank, serves as Technical Advisor & Caribbean focal point with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and is a Visiting Research Fellow with Boston University’s Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. As an expert facilitator, practitioner and policy advisor, Janot is an innovator in transformation management, collective intelligence, pioneering the use of serious games and creative arts for effective learning and dialogue, and has co-designed and facilitated game-enabled processes to support a variety of World Bank activities. Janot acts for racial justice, facilitates conversations on race and served on the Metro Boston Race Amity taskforce, culminating with the governor’s proclamation of Massachusetts Race Amity Day, encouraging cities and towns to develop programming.

Regie Gibson
Literary Performer

Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba, and Europe. In Italy, representing the U.S., Regie received both the Absolute Poetry Award (Monfalcone) and the Europa en Versi Award (LaGuardia di Como). He’s received the Walker Scholarship for Poetry from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) Grants for the production of his first musical The Juke: A Blues Bacchae in which he uses Euripides’ tragedy to explore African-American music and spirituality. Regie has performed with the Sharnier Theater in Hanover, Germany, The Lexington Symphony Orchestra, and has composed texts for The Boston City Singers, The Mystic Chorale and the Handel+Haydn Society. He has served as consultant for both the National Endowment for the Arts “How Art Works” initiative and the “Mere Distinction of Color”— a permanent exhibit examining the legacy of slavery and the U.S. constitution at President James Madison’s historic Montpelier home. Regie was a Poet-in-Residence at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and is Poet-in-Residence at Lexington’s Cary Memorial Library. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin—which received a Golden Pen Award, and the creator of The Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy— a theatrical, literary-concert focusing on the life, works, and modern influence of William Shakespeare. He is the lead singer, lyricist, and percussionist for Atlas Soul— a multicultural, global-funk, world music ensemble, and is a creative on a team of scientists and members of the Red Cross-Red Crescent helping to craft language regarding issues of climate change. He holds an MFA in Poetry and teaches in the English department at Clark University.

Emily Flake
Artist

Emily Flake began cartooning for The New Yorker in 2008 and has had more than a hundred cartoons published in the magazine since. Her cartoons, essays, and illustrations have also appeared in Mad, the New York Times, the New Statesman, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail, and in many other publications. She is the author of “Mama Tried” and her newest book, “That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug,” published by Viking in 2019.

“Feggo” Felipe Galindo
Artist

“Feggo” Felipe Galindo, creates humorous art in a variety of media, including cartoons, illustrations, animations, fine art & public art. Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he resides in New York City. His work has been exhibited and published worldwide including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, MAD, Private Eye and The New York Times, among many others.

Yasin Osman
Artist

Yasin Osman is an award-winning Toronto-based photographer and cartoonist. In 2015, Osman founded Shoot For Peace an art mentorship program in Toronto for boys & girls, blending his background in education and passions for youth empowerment, art and photography. In 2018 Yasin started a webcomic series called ‘Grandpa Ali & Friends’ that later got published as a comic book under the same name. Today, Osman works as a youth worker by day while juggling photography and making cartoons. His work can be seen in The New Yorker & Reader’s Digest.

Risk and Crisis Communication in a COVID-19 World: Replanting the Seeds of Trust

February 17, 2021 4:51 pm Published by Leave a comment

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With media attention dying down, support networks advancing to their next crisis, and relief budgets drying up, the after-effects of a crisis often generate additional mistrust and despair. Those most affected are often those that are already most vulnerable, who can be feeling long-term and concentrated effects of loss of home, food shortages, devastating health effects, lack of economic opportunity. In order for leadership to keep or regain the trust of their communities, they need to have support and communications systems in place long after the immediate effects of the crises have passed.

Christy Davis
Executive Director of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation
Singapore Management University

Christy Davis is Executive Director of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation at the Singapore Management University, and Editor in Chief of its flagship publication, Social Space. She brings more than 25 years of experience across the private, public and social sectors. Prior to joining the Centre, Christy founded Asia P3 Hub, a multi-sector partnership hub hosted by World Vision International, whose aim is to tackle effects of poverty and collectively create solutions to benefit families and communities.

Immediately following the 2004 Asian tsunami, Christy made the jump from the corporate to humanitarian sector, working with UNDP as a private-sector partnership advisor. She has come to be an enthusiastic proponent of traditional and unconventional collaborations and “combinatorial innovation”, where each stakeholder brings to the table their unique assets. She believes that when combined in new ways, this co-creation approach can yield innovations to solve existing problems.

Christy was part of the first cohort to graduate from the Singapore Management University’s Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration in 2015, and also holds an Executive MBA from Sasin Graduate School of Business Administration, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Originally from the US, she has made her home across four countries in the Asia Pacific for 30 years.

Margie Warrell
Best-selling Author, International Speaker on Courage in Leadership, and Media Commentator

Best-selling Author, International Speaker on Courage in Leadership, and Media Commentator. Margie Warrell is on a mission to embolden people to lead more bravely and create a more courageous, equitable world.

Margie’s insights on courageous leadership have been shaped by her work background in Fortune 500 business, coaching and psychology along with her work with trailblazing leaders from Richard Branson to Bill Marriott and organizations such as Google, NASA and the United Nations Foundation. Due to complete her PhD in the interplay of gender, power and leadership this month, Margie is an honoree of the Women’s Economic Forum and Ambassador for Women in Global Business who is a passionate advocate for the advancement of women in leadership.

A board member of Forbes School of Business & Technology and sought after global speaker, Margie has learned a lot about over-coming fear and navigating uncertainty since her childhood growing up on a small farm in rural Australia. Due to relocate from Singapore to Washington DC this December, Margie walks her talk when it comes to living bravely, most recently summiting Mt Kilimanjaro with her husband and their four children. Margie’s released her fifth book on the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic You’ve Got This! The Life-Changing Power of Trusting Yourself.

Jonathan Hursh
Founding Partner
Utopia

Jonathan Hursh is the Founding Partner of Utopia, an urban innovation group for emerging cities. Utopia aims to build the urban ecosystem for emerging cities and their slums by establishing a network of CITYLabs across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Jonathan is an advisory board member of Harvard’s Master of Design Engineering program, an advisory board member of the World Economic Forum’s Urbanization Initiative, and a recipient of the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Anupam Yog
Advisor, Global Cultural Districts Network

Anupam Yog is a creative strategist with experience in competitive positioning of countries, cities, destinations and places. Passionate about urban innovation, Anupam is an avid community organizer and champion for walkable cities. He was invited by Singapore’s Centre for Liveable Cities to join their Young Leaders Group in 2018.

In a career spanning nearly two decades, Anupam has held leadership roles in high growth environments across the public, private & social sectors. He has crafted and implemented global campaigns for Brand India, most notably at the World Economic Forum in Davos, successfully positioning India as the “fastest growing free market democracy”; for Brand London in Beijing, Mumbai and Delhi; and led economic diplomacy & investment marketing initiatives in the UK, EU, USA, Japan, Brazil, China and ASEAN. He has also successfully helped launch Virtuous Retail, an institutional property development company that owns and operates a portfolio of ~ 6 million square feet of branded, community focused, new age retail destinations in major Indian cities.

Anupam was recognized as one of India’s leading urban innovators by Metropolis, World Association of Major Metropolises in “Indian Cities: Managing Urban Growth”. He has been invited to share his vision of alternative urban futures at SAIS – The Johns Hopkins University and the World Bank in Washington DC. He has co-developed and teaches, as guest faculty, an executive education course on ‘Inclusive Citymaking’ at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (NUS) in Singapore.

Risk and Crisis Communication in a COVID-19 World: Confronting Uncertainty

February 17, 2021 4:18 pm Published by Leave a comment

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Leaders must understand how to engage with their communities when uncertainty is high, leveraging collaboration among different sectors to understand and communicate the true effects of the crisis. A strong crisis communication strategy is able to, in real-time,  get across the realities of the predicament, addresses emotions and challenges faced in the community, and emphasizes the leadership commitments. It provides necessary information and instils confidence in recovery.

Lauren Sorkin
Executive Director
Global Resilient Cities Network

As Global Resilient Cities Network’s Executive Director, Lauren oversees global efforts to strengthen cities in the face of the complex and interconnected challenges they face. Leading a Team of urban resilience professionals in London, Mexico City, New York, and Singapore in collaboration with Chief Resilience Officers in 40 countries, her work builds on the unique capacity, breadth and legacy of the 100 Resilient Cities Program to enhance the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure. She also serves as an advisor and spokesperson on urban resilience, sustainable finance, climate risk, stakeholder engagement, and urbanization trends.

Previously with the Asian Development Bank, Lauren led the Bank’s first ever climate change investment plan before moving to the ADB’s Vietnam Office to mainstream climate risks and opportunities in the country’s US$7 billion portfolio. Before joining the ADB, she led knowledge management efforts for two USAID programs: the Eco-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam; and the Initiative for Conservation in the Andean Amazon in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. She has published work on biofuels, climate change, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS.

Lauren holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Tufts University and a Master of Science in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics. She is also a certified holistic health counselor and yoga instructor. She speaks fluent Spanish and Hebrew.

Craig Kesson
Chief Resilience Officer
Cape Town

As Executive Director of Corporate Services Craig’s portfolio is broad. 11 directors report to Craig with a complement of 2,000 staff and total operating budget of US$150 million. Craig is also the Chief Data Officer and Chief Resilience Officer for the organization. In the latter role Craig led the strategic responses to the Cape Town water crisis in 2017 and COVID-19 in 2020. Recently, this includes the economic recovery programme for the City.

Nadine Burbar
Deputy Chief Resilience Officer, Ramallah

Nadine Burbar is the Deputy Chief Resilience Officer and Head of Strategic Planning and Local Economic Development for the Ramallah Municipality in Palestine. In this role she is responsible for developing the strategic development and investment plan, as well assessing municipal performance. She works to execute public private partnerships and liaise with city stakeholders to ensure engagement and active partnership. She also manages a portfolio of investment projects. Prior to her work at the city, Nadine was with an internet service provider, Mada Al Arab. In her marketing role here she set the scope, implementation, management and review of internet campaigns. She’s a researcher, a marketing expert, and city practitioner with a master’s degree in competitiveness and innovation from the Universidad de Deusto. As well as Bachelor degree in business administration from Birzeit University.

Dr. Reuben Abraham
CEO, IDFC Institute

Reuben Abraham is CEO of IDFC Foundation and IDFC Institute, a Mumbai based think/do tank focused on state capability and political economy issues. He is a non-resident scholar at the Marron Institute at New York University, and a senior fellow at the Milken Institute in Singapore. In addition, he is a Senior Advisor to Swiss Re and an Honorary Advisor to the New Zealand government at the New Zealand Asia Foundation.

Before IDFC, he was a professor and Executive Director of the Centre for Emerging Markets Solutions (CEMS) at the top-ranked Indian School of Business (ISB). In 2012, he was named to Wired Magazine’s “Smart List 2012: 50 people who will change the world.” In 2013 and 2016, he was a Fellow at the Legatum Institute in London. He was selected as a Young Global Leader for 2009 by the World Economic Forum, where he currently serves as vice-chair of the South Asia regional board, and on the Global Futures Council on The Future of Cities and Urbanisation.

He is a member on the boards of India’s Centre for Civil Society; Advocata, a Sri Lankan think tank; THNK, The Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership; Climate Policy Foundation India; and on the investment committee of Endiya Partners, an Indian deep-tech venture fund. Recently, he joined the steering committee of GSM Association’s (GSMA) Interact Group. For a decade, he served as an independent director at the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) in New York, a global impact investing pioneer. He was also a long-serving member of the International Advisory Board of Unicredit Bank, Italy’s largest bank. He completed his M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York

Risk and Crisis Communication in a COVID-19 World: A Systems Response

February 17, 2021 4:05 pm Published by Leave a comment

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In midst of a crisis, it’s too late to begin developing a communications plan. It is necessary that leadership, be it government or private sector leaders, develop a system to communicate ahead of a crisis. Constituents expect more preparation and guidance than ever in the face of impending disasters, with more demands on the public sector to be prepared for the risk of pandemic, natural hazards, and disruption of general service.
We saw, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, that those governments with a systems response plan in place, that had engaged in scenario-building based on past learnings, had built trust in the government, and with communities with a deeply-ingrained sense of civic responsibility, have weathered the storm best.

Dr. Olivia Jensen
Lead Scientist
LRF Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, National University of Singapore

Dr Olivia Jensen is a social scientist specialising in water and environmental policy with a focus on urban Asia. She joined IPUR in 2018 as Lead Scientist overseeing the Institute’s work related to Environment and Climate. She holds a joint appointment as Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Institute of Water Policy, where she has worked from 2014.

Dr Jensen’s research is concerned with the spectrum of urban environmental risks and the design and evaluation of policy interventions to strengthen the resilience of urban communities. Her current projects include water risk governance in Asian mega-cities; the role of citizen science in assessing and managing environmental risks; and the design of effective communication strategies for risk management in areas of high vulnerability and high exposure to flood risks.

Jo Ivey Boufford
Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

Jo Ivey Boufford, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Global Health at the New York University School of Global Public Health and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine. She is President Emeritus of The New York Academy of Medicine and Immediate Past President of the International Society for Urban Health (2017-9). She served as Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University from June 1997 to November 2002. Prior to that, she served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from November 1993 to January 1997, and as Acting Assistant Secretary from January 1997 to May 1997. While at HHS, she was the U.S. representative on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1994–1997. She served in a variety of senior positions in and as President of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the largest municipal system in the United States, from December 1985 until October 1989. In NYC, she currently serves on the Board of the United Hospital Fund, is Vice Chair of the NYS Public Health and Health Planning Council (PHHPC) and Chair of its Public Health Committee. Nationally, she is on the Boards of the National Hispanic Health Foundation and the Health Effects Institute. She was elected to membership in the US National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) in 1992, served on its Board on Global Health, and served two four year terms as its Foreign Secretary from 2003 to 2011, She was elected to membership of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2015. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Boufford attended Wellesley College for two years and received her BA (Psychology) magna cum laude from the University of Michigan, and her MD, with distinction, from the University of Michigan Medical School. She is Board Certified in pediatrics.

Prof Vernon Lee
Director, Communicable Diseases
Ministry of Health, Singapore

Vernon Lee is a public health physician and has research interests in infectious diseases epidemiology and public health preparedness. He is an adjunct associate professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, performing infectious diseases research to facilitate policy decision making. His early research work explored the cost-effectiveness of strategies to reduce the impact of influenza pandemics on local populations including the use of anti-viral drugs. Since then, he has performed numerous research studies on influenza including the impact of epidemics and pandemics in tropical regions, the effectiveness of epidemiological and clinical surveillance systems in detecting epidemics, and the effectiveness of various interventions in reducing the impact of disease. Apart from his research interests, Vernon has had broad experience in policy making which he uses his research to influence in a drive towards evidence-based policy. He has worked in various positions in the Singapore government, including as head of the Singapore Armed Forces Biodefense Center where he was in-charge of preparedness, surveillance, and response to biological threats. He frequently contributes to WHO expert working groups on infectious diseases epidemiology, preparedness, and research.

Dr Lee graduated from medical school at the National University of Singapore and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore. He also holds a PhD from the Australian National University, and the Master in Public Health, and Master of Business Administration degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, USA

David Groisman
General Director of Strategic Management and Chief Resilience Officer, Buenos Aires

Chief Resilience Officer of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Economist, and specialist in public policies and urban resilience, and Agustin Botteron, Head of the Resilience Office of Santa Fe, Argentina, Civil Engineer (UTN-FRSF), MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Tufts University), with a specialty in water resources.

Discussion: Deep Tech for Disaster Response

February 17, 2021 3:51 pm Published by Leave a comment

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With so much innovation and advancement, we have come a long way in the last few decades in using technology to predict disasters and mitigate risks. Yet, the possibilities are immense.

This session titled ‘Deep Tech for Disaster Response’ moderated by Stacie Chan brings together three of the world’s best subject experts – Yossi Matias, Richard Koh and Dawn Wright to share insights around existing and planned technological tools that aid decision making during crises, and to explore how that has changed the dynamics of disaster response

Yossi Matias
Vice President
Engineering at Google, Search & AI and Global Lead, Crisis
Response Efforts, Google

Yossi is Vice President, Engineering, at Google. He is leading efforts in Search (Google Autocomplete, Search Live Results, Google Trends, Search Console), Conversational AI (Google Duplex, Call Screen, Live Caption, Live Relay, Euphonia, Recorder, Read It), and Research initiatives (from foundations to applications in Health). He is the global lead of Crisis Response (SOS Alerts, Public Alerts, Flood Forecasting) and is the founding co-lead of Google’s AI for Social Good initiative.

Yossi is the founding Site Lead in Israel (which he grew to over 1000 on staff) and the founding executive lead of Google for Startup Campus Tel Aviv. He is the founding lead of Launchpad and other global entrepreneurship programs.

In addition to his experience as entrepreneur and executive, Prof. Matias is on the Computer Science faculty at Tel Aviv University, and previously a Research Scientist at Bell Labs and visiting professor at Stanford. He published extensively, has dozens of patents on his name, and pioneered some of the early technologies for the effective analysis of big data, internet privacy, and contextual search. Yossi is a recipient of the Godel Prize and is an ACM Fellow. He is a recipient of the 2019 ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale data analytics.

Stacie Chan
Global Product Partnerships Manager
Google

Stacie Chan leads Search and Web Product Partnerships at Google for the Asia-Pacific region. She most recently moved from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to Asia to work with partners in high-growth markets. Before Partnerships at Google, Stacie worked on the Google News team, supporting news publishers around the world. Prior to Google, she was a journalist in San Francisco covering everything from politics to technology; and before that, an actress in Los Angeles, where she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award.

Richard Koh
Chief Technology Officer
Microsoft Singapore

Richard Koh is the chief technology officer of Microsoft Singapore. In this role, he is responsible for engaging with key executive leaders across government, industry and academia; bringing in the macro technology landscape; and helping customers leverage technology innovations for their digital transformation. His focus areas include guiding technology policies, standards, legal and regulatory matters, as well as security, privacy and compliance decisions.

Always passionate about the promises that the Internet and cloud computing can bring, and with a keen eye on business strategies, product development and marketing, Richard’s professional experience spans the Asia and North America regions, as well as multiple functional areas including research & development, IT, product management, marketing, business development and sales operations.

After 12 years at Hewlett-Packard, he joined Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where he led product teams as director of technical product management in Microsoft’s Office business, Servers & Tools business, as well as telecommunication solutions businesses, and eventually became part of the founding product team for Microsoft’s flagship productivity cloud services suite – Office 365. He then relocated to Singapore, and spearheaded Emerging Markets strategy for Microsoft Operations as the operations team unit lead working on Microsoft’s cloud services launch efforts in China.

Richard currently serves on the board of directors of Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs’ Home Team Science & Technology Agency (HTX), Sentosa Development Corporation’s Digital Transformation Advisory Panel, chairman of SGTech’s AI & HPC Chapter, as well as an advisory member of Singapore ITE’s (Institute of Technical Education) Electronics and Info-Comm Technology Academic Advisory Committee.

Dawn Wright
Chief Scientist
Esri

As Chief Scientist of Esri, Dawn Wright aids in strengthening the scientific foundation for Esri software and services, while also representing Esri to the scientific community. A specialist in marine geology, Dawn has authored and contributed to some of the most definitive literature on marine GIS. Dawn is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the Geological Society of America, of the California Academy of Sciences, of Stanford University’s Leopold Leadership Program (now known as the Earth Leadership Program), and holds lifetime achievement awards from the American Association of Geographers, the Geological Society of America, and UC Santa Barbara. She maintains an affiliated faculty appointment as Professor of Geography and Oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

Fact, Fiction, Fixation: Communicating risk amidst misinformation

February 17, 2021 3:26 pm Published by Leave a comment

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The speed and reach of misinformation in a crisis does not just make the job of the risk communicator more difficult, it may put lives at risk. Authorities face the uphill task of building and maintaining public trust to ensure that key messages are understood and acted on, while limiting the spread of false information which can undermine compliance with safety measures. This panel looks at the impact of misinformation on how people perceive and manage risks from health and food safety to climate change and natural hazards and assesses the options for risk communicators seeking to counter misinformation and its harmful effects. The panel draws on diverse perspectives from traditional and social media, psychology, sociology and communications research.

Dr. Olivia Jensen
Lead Scientist
LRF Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, National University of Singapore

Dr Olivia Jensen is a social scientist specialising in water and environmental policy with a focus on urban Asia. She joined IPUR in 2018 as Lead Scientist overseeing the Institute’s work related to Environment and Climate. She holds a joint appointment as Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy’s Institute of Water Policy, where she has worked from 2014.

Dr Jensen’s research is concerned with the spectrum of urban environmental risks and the design and evaluation of policy interventions to strengthen the resilience of urban communities. Her current projects include water risk governance in Asian mega-cities; the role of citizen science in assessing and managing environmental risks; and the design of effective communication strategies for risk management in areas of high vulnerability and high exposure to flood risks.

David Fogarty
Climate Change Editor
Straits Times

David Fogarty joined The Straits Times as an Assistant Foreign Editor in 2014 and became Climate Change Editor in September 2019, building on years of experience in climate reporting. While studying science at university in Canberra, David started writing science news stories in 1986, including the relatively new area of climate change. He has worked for newspapers in Australia, Britain and Hong Kong. He joined Reuters in Hong Kong in 1994 as a desk editor and shifted to Singapore in 1997, all the while maintaining a strong interest in climate change and the environment. From 2008 to 2012, he was Reuters first Climate Change Correspondent. After Reuters, he did media consulting for a group of US foundations, mainly focusing on environmental issues in Indonesia.

Sarah Cumbers
Director Evidence and Insight
LR Foundation

Sarah joined Lloyd’s Register Foundation in autumn 2019 as the founding Director of Evidence and Insight. Her team works to use data and evidence to help better understand the complex factors that affect safety. This includes driving improvements in the availability, quality and accessibility of data, synthesis of evidence, and implementation of evidence into practice to improve safety outcomes.

Gita Johar
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business
Columbia Business School

Gita is a Professor at Columbia Business School and the school’s inaugural Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She received her PhD from the NYU Stern School of Business in 1993 and her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC) in 1985. She received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIMC in 2019. Gita has been on the faculty at Columbia Business School since 1992 and has served the school, the university, and the marketing profession in many leadership roles. She co-chaired the Association for Consumer Research annual conference in 2009 and currently serves as an Ombuds for that conference. She served as co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research from 2014 to 2017 and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Marketing on Better Marketing for a Better World. She has served as associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and is currently an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing. Gita studies consumer identity, beliefs, and persuasion as they relate to branding, advertising, and media. Her work has been published in top marketing and psychology journals as well as in PNAS and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Gita’s current research studies why people believe and share fake news and how to develop interventions based on this understanding to help clean up the media ecosystem.

UR2020 Keynote Ken Pimlott

February 15, 2021 1:08 pm Published by Leave a comment

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Chief Ken Pimlott, retired Head of CAL FIRE, will share his experiences of tackling some of the biggest fires in California’s history, including the Camp Fire of 2018. Data and risk information play a large role as CAL FIRE prepares for fire season and responds to sweeping fires in the area. No less important is the outreach and public engagement that Chief Pimlott and his team take on to mitigate the fire risk. Learn about the work of Chief Pimlott and CAL FIRE in this keynote.

Ken Pimlott
Chief of CAL FIRE
retired

Chief Pimlott began his fire service career in 1984 as a reserve fire fighter in Contra Costa County, California. He joined CAL FIRE in 1987 as a seasonal fire fighter, and ultimately worked his way through the ranks to Director, a position he held from 2010 until his retirement in December 2018. Chief Pimlott has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Forest Resource Management from Humboldt State University and is a Registered Professional Forester in California. Under his leadership, CAL FIRE and the State of California battled historic wildfires and an unprecedented bark beetle epidemic while at the same time increased the pace and scale of forest management and fire prevention. Chief Pimlott participated in numerous committees at the State and national level and testified before Congress on multiple occasions in support of legislation related to forest management and fire protection, including the federal fire funding fix.

The production of this keynote is brought to you with support from 

Keynote: Dr. Losang Rabgey

February 15, 2021 11:41 am Published by Leave a comment

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All too often we think about risk in terms of what can be lost, but what if we could flip that? What would happen if risk calculations integrated a bit more empathy and compassion? Dr Losang Rabgey will walk us through her journey of taking risks through empathy, resulting in powerful long-term outcomes. Dr Rabgey is sure to inspire, creating meaning out of risk.

Losang Rabgey
Co-Founder and Executive Director
Machik

Born in a Tibetan refugee settlement in India and raised in Canada, Dr. Losang Rabgey holds a Ph.D. from the University of London and is the first Tibetan to hold a graduate degree in feminist anthropology. Rabgey is also the first Tibetan Commonwealth Scholar and National Geographic Explorer. In 1998, she and her sister, Dr. Tashi Rabgey, co-founded Machik, a non-profit whose mission is to grow a global community of care for a stronger future for Tibet.  In the last two decades, Machik has supported education for thousands of rural youth in Tibet and the diaspora. The organization has also supported Tibetan change-makers in Tibet—particularly in rural communities—who work in education, film, gender equity, conservation, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Gender equity has always been a key focus of Machik’s work through programs like the Mother’s Wish Foundation—providing support for women’s higher education—and the Machik Gender Summit.  Dr. Rabgey and her sister have been named by Harvard Law School as “Women Inspiring Change,” a recognition which has included—among others—Stacey Abrams, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Kamala Harris. Dr. Rabgey and her family were recently honored with the Meritorious Service Cross by the Governor-General of Canada. A frequent public speaker, Dr. Rabgey has presented at Yale University, Harvard University, UC Santa Cruz, and the Nobel Peace Forum, among many others.  Rabgey first traveled to Tibet with her family in 1987.

UR2020 Opening ceremony – Part 1

February 15, 2021 11:35 am Published by Leave a comment

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The Understanding Risk Community was born out of a need to bring together diverse sectors who are all trying to better understand and manage disaster and climate risk to create a more resilient world. Join our host, Kaori Enjoji, as she opens up the 10th anniversary celebration of the UR Community! We will hear remarks from Mari Pangestu, the World Bank’s Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships, and a speech from Peter Ho, former head of Singapore’s civil service (note, video starts a 5.05minutes).

Mari Pangestu
Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships
World bank

Mari Pangestu is the World Bank Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships. In this role, which she assumed on March 1, 2020, Ms. Pangestu provides leadership and oversees the research and data group of the World Bank (DEC), the work program of the World Bank’s Global Practice Groups, and the External and Corporate Relations function.

Ms. Pangestu joins the Bank with exceptional policy and management expertise, having served as Indonesia’s Minister of Trade from 2004 to 2011 and as Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy from 2011 to 2014.

She has had vast experience of over 30 years in academia, second track processes, international organizations and government working in areas related to international trade, investment and development in multilateral, regional and national settings.

Most recently, Ms. Pangestu was a Senior Fellow at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, as well as Professor of International Economics at the University of Indonesia, adjunct professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University and a Board Member of Indonesia Bureau of Economic Research (IBER), as well as Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Jakarta.

Ms. Pangestu is highly regarded as an international expert on a range of global issues. She served as Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington D.C and as advisor to the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation of International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in Abu Dhabi. Her record of board and task force service includes the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), co-chair of the expert group for the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, the panel of the WHO health initiative, the Equal Access Initiative, commissioner for the Low Carbon Development Initiative of Indonesia and executive board member of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). She has also served on the board of a number of private sector companies.

She obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics from the Australian National University, and her doctorate in economics from the University of California at Davis. She is married and has two children.

Peter Ho
Senior Advisor
Centre for strategic futures

Peter Ho is the Senior Advisor to the Centre for Strategic Futures and a Senior Fellow in the Civil Service College. 

Peter Ho is Chairman of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore (URA), Chairman of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Chairman of the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), Chairman of the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Steering Committee, Chairman of the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) Governing Council, Chairman of the Office for Space Technology & Industry (OSTIn) Board, and Chairman of  PRECIsion Health Research, SingaporE (PRECISE) Pro-Tem Board Oversight Committee.  He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National University of Singapore (NUS), and a board member of the National Research Foundation (NRF), a member of the Board of Governors of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), and of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP).  

When he retired from the Singapore Administrative Service in 2010 after a career in the Public Service stretching more than 34 years, he was Head, Civil Service, concurrent with his other appointments of Permanent Secretary (Foreign Affairs), Permanent Secretary (National Security & Intelligence Coordination), and Permanent Secretary (Special Duties) in the Prime Minister’s Office.  Before that, he was Permanent Secretary (Defence).  He was also the inaugural Chairman of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore.

Kaori Enjoji
Journalist

Host of UR2020

From the early outbreak aboard a cruise ship to the abrupt fall of the country’s longest serving prime minister, Kaori Enjoji spent most of 2020 in Japan reporting about the pandemic and its social, political and economic impact for CNN.

After graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she joined Reuters as a correspondent to work in the Tokyo and London bureaus. She later switched to television to serve as CNBC’s bureau chief based in Tokyo. Storytelling has been her passion since she first saw the World Press Photo exhibition as a teenager growing up in Amsterdam. Kaori was raised on three continents and is bilingual in English and Japanese.  She is also proficient in Dutch and French. She reports for print, television and online media by melding those languages and cultures in an unscientific mix. She is currently working on a documentary project to mark the ten years since the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In her free time, Kaori enjoys being beaten in a good game of shogi by her teenage son.

Covid-19 and Risk Management: Lessons Learned in Costa Rica to Face the Next Crisis

February 12, 2021 3:17 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Covid-19 and Risk Management: Lessons Learned in Costa Rica to Face the Next Crisis

Organizer: ARX Consultores

In the session, Kathryn Milliken and Andrea Camargo from the World Food Programme (WFP) will present the Risk Finance Strategy for LAC and the risk layered approach adopted by WFP Guatemala. Edgar Uribe (Swiss Re) and Iker Llabres (MiCRO) are going to present the work behind the design of the weather index microinsurance product that will be piloted in Guatemala from April 2021 with Aseguradora Rural.

Background: The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region is exposed to a diversity of shocks threatening communities’ livelihoods and food security. Building resilience of the most vulnerable and food insecure is a priority for WFP, with risk financing playing an important role.

The Regional Office of WFP in Latin America and the Caribbean adopted in 2020 a Risk Financing Strategy to encourage the adoption of innovative, responsible, sustainable and scalable risk financing tools to build resilience of the most vulnerable and food insecure. Inspired by this regional strategy, Guatemala is adopting a layered approach where the complementarity between microinsurance, forecast-based financing (FbF), and macro and meso risk financing tools is at the core. Other countries such as Dominica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and El Salvador are currently exploring the pathways to integrate risk financing tools within their programmes.

WFP Guatemala, in collaboration with Swiss Re (reinsurance coverage), Aseguradora Rural (local reinsurer) and the Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organisation (MiCRO) (technical design of the product), has worked on the integration of a weather index microinsurance product covering drought and excess rain into their programmes to boost resilience and productivity of smallholder farmers and microentrepreneurs. In order to ensure sustainability, WFP Guatemala designed a scalable and sustainable strategy that requires linking the microinsurance product with supply value chains. The product is awaiting the approval of the Guatemalan supervisory authority, Superintendencia de Bancos (SIB).The Covid-19 pandemic caught most nations unaware of its implications. Response was rapid once realities started to appear as inevitable; sanitary measures were applied when feasible, even if improvisation and trial-and-error prevailed. But almost nowhere pre-arranged risk management notions, procedures and protocols were and are still not applied. An opportunity was lost to minimize losses and most of all, to prepare to face for the next crisis, derived either from natural as well as anthropogenic hazards, and their respective vulnerabilities.

Costa Rica was not an exception to this panorama. The Covid-19 pandemic arrived at Costa Rica in March 2020 in the middle of an intense fiscal and social crisis. It was initially faced as a dangerous “surprising and unexpected” situation. Its sanitary management was successful (until now) thanks to a robust social health and medicine system and because the President of the Republic stepped aside and left its conduction to the Ministry of Health (an epidemiologist) and the President of the Social Security Authority (a biochemist); science became a priority.

The National Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Commission, in charge of coordinating and organizing the primary response, acted vigorously. This response was inspired by experiences gathered while facing natural hazards. However, management has been essentially reactive and business continuity has not been an active goal. The rest of the risk management toolbox spectrum has not been used: participative risk understanding, social risk communication, risk reduction through prevention and mitigation procedures, risk financing and protection through retention, transfer instruments and residual risk determinations, open real-time data access and discussion, and most of all that it becomes critical to acknowledge the fact that the “post” of this event is inevitably the “pre” of the next one…In the session, Kathryn Milliken and Andrea Camargo from the World Food Programme (WFP) will present the Risk Finance Strategy for LAC and the risk layered approach adopted by WFP Guatemala. Edgar Uribe (Swiss Re) and Iker Llabres (MiCRO) are going to present the work behind the design of the weather index microinsurance product that will be piloted in Guatemala from April 2021 with Aseguradora Rural.

Background: The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region is exposed to a diversity of shocks threatening communities’ livelihoods and food security. Building resilience of the most vulnerable and food insecure is a priority for WFP, with risk financing playing an important role.

The Regional Office of WFP in Latin America and the Caribbean adopted in 2020 a Risk Financing Strategy to encourage the adoption of innovative, responsible, sustainable and scalable risk financing tools to build resilience of the most vulnerable and food insecure. Inspired by this regional strategy, Guatemala is adopting a layered approach where the complementarity between microinsurance, forecast-based financing (FbF), and macro and meso risk financing tools is at the core. Other countries such as Dominica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and El Salvador are currently exploring the pathways to integrate risk financing tools within their programmes.

WFP Guatemala, in collaboration with Swiss Re (reinsurance coverage), Aseguradora Rural (local reinsurer) and the Microinsurance Catastrophe Risk Organisation (MiCRO) (technical design of the product), has worked on the integration of a weather index microinsurance product covering drought and excess rain into their programmes to boost resilience and productivity of smallholder farmers and microentrepreneurs. In order to ensure sustainability, WFP Guatemala designed a scalable and sustainable strategy that requires linking the microinsurance product with supply value chains. The product is awaiting the approval of the Guatemalan supervisory authority, Superintendencia de Bancos (SIB).

Speakers:
Sergio Mora Castro, Consultant at ARX

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