The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a workshop on:
Navigating Uncertainties: Assessment of Resilient Wards in Mumbai
Speaker:
Piyush Kumar, Senior Research Fellow & Doctoral Candidate, Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies (ADCPS), IIT Bombay.
Tuesday, 25th February 2025, 3:45 PM IST onwards. The event will be held online via Zoom. Please register below to attend.
About the Talk
Developing economies like India are seen to prioritise disaster rehabilitation and rescue over risk reduction and preparedness due to limited resources for planning and resilience building. Cities like Mumbai claim to be India’s greatest metropolis due to their enormous population and economy. However, its large slum population on elevated terrains, river banks, and obstructed drainage systems, with a persistent demand for resources, make it vulnerable.
In the face of accelerating climate change, uncertainty emerges as a pivotal challenge for crafting effective public policies aimed at enhancing climate resilience in India. Drawing from a synthesis of scholarly research and policy documents, this talk delineates the sources and manifestations of uncertainty, encompassing climatic variability, socio-economic complexities, and technological uncertainties via a fuzzy logic process. Moreover, it delves into the inherent uncertainties surrounding climate projections, resource availability, and the diverse impacts on vulnerable populations and simplify the decision-making process. When confronted with limited data and substantial uncertainty, expert knowledge and linguistic assessments often become a necessity. Fuzzy set theory serves as a foundation for modelling non-probabilistic uncertainty, incorporating subjective insights and human expertise to represent uncertainties in parameters. Hierarchical Fuzzy Logic Process is used for fuzzification, inferencing, and aggregation at each level of the hierarchy until the final output set is obtained, representing a city ward’s performance in terms of its belongingness in good, average, and poor categories. The wards’ performances can be compared at all levels of hierarchy across each dimension. It also provides an insight in understanding of risk as a composite of not just external hazard factors, but also of intrinsic characteristics which may act as vulnerabilities or capacities for systems, people, the economy, governance, and built environment in coping with external forces.
About the Speaker
Piyush Kumar is a Senior Research Fellow and a Doctoral Candidate at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies (ADCPS) at IIT Bombay. He has been actively engaged in teaching, research, and advocacy, with primary research interests in Climate Modelling, Urban Policy, Energy and Environmental Economics, Health Policy, and Sustainability Studies. He possesses an M.Phil in Planning and Development from IIT Bombay and a Master’s degree from Delhi School of Economics. He co-founded the Delhi University Sustainability Forum (DUSF), a consortium of college and school students promoting environmental awareness, and has effectively organised several conferences and events in partnership with UNDP, UNEP, TERI, WWF, and the Government of NCT of Delhi. He has participated in initiatives and research projects with the Rural Technology and Action Group (RuTAG), IIT Bombay, and TATA Trusts in the rural districts of Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh promoting data driven governance. He has delivered his papers at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the University of Colorado Boulder, Michigan State University, and the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, among others.
Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here.
