Ecosystem-Based Disaster and Climate Resilience

Mahua Mukherjee is a professor in the Department of Architecture and Planning at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), India. She was Head, Centre of Excellence in Disaster Mitigation and Management in IIT Roorkee. She has worked in the field of sustainable development, urbanising habitat, urban climate, and risk resilience with an inclusive approach. Her research expertise involves investigation of urban environmental risks including heat islands and water stress, and solution-centric scenario generation using the blue-green infrastructure. She is involved with India's seismic resilience mission for habitat; she has contributed to the SAARC Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre and has organised training sessions, conferences, and edited volumes. She is a Fulbright Fellow and was Visiting Faculty at Pennsylvania State University, USA, and the Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan. Prof. Mukherjee is engaged with young scholars and has organised resilience- and sustainability-related competitions. Currently, she is UNDRR-APSTAG Board Member and Secretary-General to the South Asia Alliance for Disaster Research Institutes (SAADRI).
Rajib Shaw is a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance in Keio University, Japan. He is also Senior Fellow of the Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) Japan and Chairperson of the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (SEEDS) Asia and the Church World Service (CWS) Japan, two Japanese NGOs. Earlier, he was the executive director of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) and was a professor at Kyoto University. His expertise includes disaster governance, community-based disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, urban risk management, and disaster and environmental education. Professor Shaw is the chair of the United Nations Science Technology Advisory Group (STAG) for disaster risk reduction and the co-chair of the Asia Science Technology Academic Advisory Group (ASTAAG). He is also the coordinating lead author for the Asia chapter of IPCC's 6th Assessment Report. He is the editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Progress in Disaster Science and the series editor of the Springer book series on disaster risk reduction. Prof. Shaw has published 51 books and over 300 academic papers and book chapters.