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Dr. Umamaheshwaran Rajasekar is Director at Taru Leading Edge where he is leading the company’s vertical on risk and resilience. He is a disaster management and climate change expert with over 15 years of experience in developing risk reduction strategies, climate change analysis, hazard modeling, institutional analysis, adaptation & mitigation plans for governments, INGOs, bi-lateral and multi-lateral agencies. His interest and recent efforts are targeted towards bridging the gap between technology and society to enable informed decision making in a changing environment. He has been the team leader and project manager for some of the pioneering urban risk resilience efforts in India including implementation of end to end early warning systems for urban floods, establishment of urban health and climate resilience center, development of disease surveillance system, mainstreaming of urban service monitoring systems, conduct of hazard vulnerability & risk analysis and preparation of city resilience strategies.
His work in the area of urban risk assessment, heat island modeling, climate variability analysis, disease surveillance systems has been published as peer reviewed journal articles, technical reports and has been presented at various international and national forums. Several of his work has been commended in the form of grants and awards. His recent work on development and implementation of Urban Health Serives Monitoring System has been recogonized as an intervention to watch, by the U.N Seceretary General’s global pulse initiatiave.
The 2015 Chennai Flood: A Case for Developing City Resilience Strategies
In November-December 2015 Chennai and its neighboring coastal districts in India experienced torrential rainfall followed by a devastating flood. Amid the chaos and widespread impact, the event brought people and institutions in and outside Chennai together, to provide support to the victims affected by the flood. Help reached the affected areas and their residents from different sections of society and in variety of forms. The lessons from this case study and others like it can help urban centers elsewhere in Asia to plan for similar eventualities.
