Expert of the Week   for  08 - 14 Feb 2016

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Sushil Gupta

General Manager, Risk Modeling and Insurance

RMSI Pvt Ltd. (RMSI) Expertise:  Disaster management, DRR, urban exposure, vulnerability and risk assessment, coping with climate change, capacity building, resilience; estimation of average annual loss (AAL), loss cost, and probable maximum loss (PML); seismic alarms, early warning systems, Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) site selection and its aseismic design, seismic shake table testing, seismic re-evaluation of older generation NPPs.

Mr Sushil Gupta has over 23 years of professional experience in the field of catastrophic risk modelling, engineering seismology and earthquake engineering, and DRR. He has executed several multi-hazard risk assessment projects related to DRR and climate adaptation as a project manager/team leader that were sponsored by the World Bank, UNISDR, UNDP and Govt. of India. An IITian having an M.Tech. in Applied Geophysics with specialisation in Engineering Seismology and MBA with specialisation in Insurance management, Mr Gupta also obtained advance level certificates in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction with special emphasis on climate change from EPFL, Switzerland; the World Bank Institute, Washington DC and NIDM; and in the field of Earthquake Engineering of Nuclear facilities from ICTP, Trieste, Italy and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. An author with 55 research publications to his credit, he was one of the ‘Peer Reviewer of UNISDR Global Risk Assessment, 2011’ and ‘UNISDR Expert of Week (2014)’. He is co-author of a book- ‘Coping with Climate Change: Principles and Asian Context’, a Springer Publication. He is the recipient of many awards and honours including 2011 A.S. Arya – IITR Disaster Prevention Award.

Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation in Asia

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QQuestion by Mr Daniel Tuckermann

Dear Sushil Gupta,
- What is your estimation regarding the Risk Exposure Index by David Simchi-Levi for SCM and disaster risk reduction? Do you think it should be the standard? Do you think the REI can be beneficial in other areas?
- What is your estimation regarding cyber-attacks? Isn't it a megathreat like natural disasters? An unknown-unknown risk with huge potential impact?
Thank you

Mr Daniel Tuckermann Student | Berlin School of Economics and Law
Germany

APosted on 11 Feb 2016

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for your question. 

David Simchi-Levi REI enables to focus on mitigation efforts on the risk drivers and risk areas. It was developed for identifying the risk drivers in the supply-chain network (SCM) and was successfully implemented at Ford Motor Company. Recently, UNISDR published a paper using REI on 2011 Thailand flood, which impacted the industrial sector including the automotive and electronics industries to a great extent and whole economy. This paper itself demonstrate that REI can be beneficial in other areas.

Regarding you question about being it standard, only time would tell as the future study emerge on its applications.

Yes, cyber-attacks could also be a mega-threat like a natural hazards in terms of their economic impact, albeit, different in their impact and occurrence mechanism. A natural hazard like earthquake can not be stopped while a cyber-attack could be stopped by having proper fire-walls in place, a constant vigil, isolating and triplicating the key servers at different geographies and identifying and plugging the areas of weaknesses in the networks.

 I hope, this answers your question.

THIS SESSION CONCLUDED ON

14
February
2016