Risk Know-How (IPUR)
Summary:
| How do we empower people communicating about risks in their communities to navigate information and to take part in constructive discussions about risk? This participative session will engage the audience in developing a framework for risk know-how and identify the steps needed to achieve it in communities around the world. |
Speakers:
Tracey Brown
Mariko Nishizawa
Bernard Okebe
Wandi Bruine de Bruin
Understanding Extreme Urban Heat – Launch of the Digital Earth Partnership Technology Award
Summary:
| Background: Climate change is driving rising temperatures in East Asian cities, the effects of which are being compounded by the urban heat island effect that is associated with the modification of land surfaces due to urbanization. And these rising urban temperatures threaten to have adverse impacts on the productivity, inclusion, and livability of the region’s cities. Experts predict mean annual temperatures in East Asia will increase by up to 3.8 °C by the century’s end. Some parts of the region may see much greater increases. In the best-case scenario, Myanmar and Thailand can expect 80-90 days per year with temperatures over 35 °C by 2050, an increase of roughly 20 days from today. This increase in temperature will be much worse in cities where the Urban Heat Island Effect could raise temperatures by a further 7 °C. Urban heat is strongly corelated with reduced productivity, poorer education and health outcomes, and more crime. This is especially true for low income countries as the UHI effect disproportionately impacts poor or otherwise excluded communities. Objectives: To provide for better measurement of urban temperatures and understanding of its impacts on key urban development outcomes, Singapore Space & Technology Limited and the World Bank Group, with financial support from the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), are launching the “Digital Earth Partnership Technology Award”. This award aims to source for space tech organisations to utilise remote sensing satellite technology to acquire and process satellite data to better measure temperatures in East Asian cities and analyse the strength of the UHI effect, which will also include ground-truthing work to help verify the satellite-based estimates for a select number of East Asian cities: Jakarta (IDN), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Manila (Philippines), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Vietiane (Lao PDR). To launch the award, this session will bring together speakers from industry, the World Bank and Singapore Space & Technology to discuss, from their different perspectives, the challenges posed by rising urban temperatures, strategies that are being adopted to deal with these challenges, and how, by leveraging advances in space technology, the award can contribute to more evidence-based policy and decision-making when it comes to both mitigating and adapting to the impacts of extreme urban heat. |
Speakers:
Stéphane Hallegatte
Lynette Tan
Pedro Santa-Rivera
Nicolette Yeo
Responsible AI for DRM (Robert Soden, Toronto)
Summary:
| Featuring an interview with Robert Soden from the University of Toronto. |
Speakers:
Robert Soden
Enhancing Resilience of Smart Cities through Cognitive Computing Technology
Summary:
| The resilience of a modern society comprises both infrastructure and social resilience. Social and cognitive factors are essential for making a populated area such as a city, more resilient. Smart cities allow for the integration of cognitive computing technology and cognitive engineering approaches with the goal of improving the quality of human decision-making, e.g., less error-prone and faster. This simultaneously fosters sense-making and cognition at organizational and community levels, and helps to prevent, mitigate, respond to and recover from potential disruptions. We will demonstrate and discuss examples including improving cognitive resilience in control rooms through cognition-aware human computer interaction, and detecting weak signals in social networks. In addition, we will show how social media can be integrated with machine learning and natural language processing techniques to obtain public opinions towards government policies, which can be used as effective feedback for policy adjustment so as to achieve improved social resilience. |
Speakers:
Jonas Jörin
Kezhi Mao
Martin Raubal
Majeed Khader
FutuRisk – Foresight-Based Approach to Explore Multiple Futures and Anticipate Risks
Summary:
| Geopolitics of Asia produces complex patterns of competition, conflict, cooperation, and potentially a disastrous disintegration, which are unfolding at the same time in a volatile environment characterised by uncertainty, exceptional disruption, and unprecedented change. This interactive session will immerse the participants in a foresight-based workshop to explore systemic patterns to surface assumptions, explore how the emerging trends can shape the future, and identify potential enablers and disruptions that might affect the future of geopolitics in Asia in 2040. This quick experiential session will focus on scenarios building and storytelling using LEGO® bricks and elements to inject elements of fun, creativity, and imagination through a 3D-model building. |
Speakers:
Cheryl Chung
Anie Febriastati
China’s First Comprehensive National Survey of Natural Disaster Risks
Summary:
| China’s first comprehensive national survey of natural disaster risks is the largest such risk survey project in the world so far. This session will introduce the design, specific tasks and progress of the national risk survey project, and highlight the latest findings in the fields of earthquake, geological and meteorological disasters risk research in China. In the context of climate change, extreme weather and climate events occur more frequently in China. Meteorological and geological disaster risk management is particularly important and challenging. This session will also cover the current disaster risk assessment, mitigation and prevention systems of mmeteorological and geological disasters in China. https://nsem.bnu.edu.cn/ |
Speakers:
Martin Raiser
Baitao Sun
Jianqing Zhai
Ge Gao
Ying Li
Bin Tong
Saini Yang
Dynamic Risk Models for Evolving Cities
Summary:
| Key to making informed policy decisions to promote resilient and sustainable future cities is the ability to model risk as it relates to dynamic changes in our urban environments, reflecting population increase, urban growth patterns and evolving vulnerability linked to time-dependent processes. We bring together experts in risk analysis, decision support systems, machine learning and policy to discuss how risk models can best account for the uncertain future built environment, thus enabling proactive actions that reduce future risk arising from a larger than present-day asset base. The session will cover public and private interest in this work and highlight some analytical modelling approaches. https://earthobservatory.sg |
Speakers:
David Lallemant
Graeme Riddell
Rashmin Gunasekera
Maricar Rabonza
Gizem Mestav Sarica
Hedwig van Delden
Plenary Panel – Averted Disasters
Summary:
| Good news or Bad news. How do we make the invisible visible? A session to recognise the hidden hero’s of normality. Presenting the Averted disaster award. Link: http://averteddisasteraward.org/ |
Speakers:
Pablo Suarez
David Lallemant
Innovation in Risk Finance: Modelling Matters!
Summary:
| Disseminate insights and lessons learnt from innovative modelling work completed as part of South-East Asian Disaster Risk Insurance Facility (SEADRIF) offering an initial flood insurance product. The focus of this session will be on modelling used for risk transfer products offered by SEADRIF. In addition it will also offer information to inform broader activities for DRM, climate analytics and rapid post-event impact assessments. SEADRIF’s first insurance product combines innovative modelling approaches to support the placement of a sovereign parametric insurance product. In this session, moderated by the World Bank, the SEADRIF Insurance Company along with private sector companies collaborating on this successful placement will show how new technologies enabled countries to access the insurance market. Then along with additional experts in this space they will discuss some of the advancements which can support better understanding of risk and improved financial resilience. The World Bank, Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/disaster-risk-financing-and-insurance-program |
Speakers:
Hang Thu Vu
Soo Hoon Hauw-Quek
Paul Maisey
Apoorv Dabral
Lynette Tan
Integrating Resilience into the Financial System – Practitioner Perspectives
Summary:
| Aligning financial flows with climate-resilient development is one of the goals of the Paris Agreement. In this event, we discuss the rationale for alignment and ask what this means in practice and review progress toward this. We hear from practitioners across government, banking, infrastructure investment and disaster risk financing communities on how we can accelerate progress in integrating risk and resilience into financial decision making in the Asia region. |
Speakers:
Nicola Ranger, Rowan Douglas, Ila Patnaik
Anders Nordheim, Conor Donaldson,
Benedikt Signer, Calvin Quek
